Everybody sells. Even your hourly paid janitor or security guard. Whenever they’re seen or approached by a prospect or customer, they’re selling your company.
Think about those 1,000s of interactions every day. And each one has the potential to gain you new business -or- send customers fleeing to your competitors.
Here’s a story that got me thinking about a practical way for you to add 10s, 100s, or 1,000s of salespeople, for free. Read on. (more…)
June 26th, 2009
Cold calling has been seen as a good thing up to the ’80s and then seen as a bad thing in the 21st century.
Today, nothing strikes more dread and fear in salespeople as cold calling.
Yet business owners and sales managers see cold calling as an essential function for new business development on a budget. (more…)
June 20th, 2009
Yes, there is a secret. Yes, there is a #1 of secrets. Yes, it helps sell more contracts, and the larger ones at that.
Here’s the secret: it’s the difference between a cough and pneumonia.
This isn’t a question on an exam in med school. It is the sales secret for how successful salespeople connect service symptoms to the larger conditions of customers’ businesses. (more…)
June 12th, 2009
A current trend is for greater involvement by Procurement in service contracts of all sizes.
In the past Procurement had always run large bids. Now it seems they’re running many smaller ones too.
These smaller contract decisions used to be made by the business owner (customer’s manager) alone. Now, Procurement has their hands all over it. (more…)
June 1st, 2009
There’s not a lot known about Socrates, (469 BC to 399 BC), but it’s fairly certain he didn’t provide sales training for presentations.
However, he did provide a legacy of questioning used to solve a problem and produce an answer, which became known as the Socratic Method.
This method is now a commonly used teaching technique in law schools. Professors ask students a series of questions, eventually leading students to question their assumptions and beliefs upon which their original answers were based.
The Socratic Method teaches critical thinking rather than memorizing tons of data. (more…)
May 20th, 2009
The following story is true.
A security guard firm was bidding on a large, $1 million contract. The firm had successfully completed the customer’s RFP process, making the short list from 15 bidders down to 4 finalists.
The customer gave each bidder 10 minutes for a presentation. A questionable and mysterious length of time for a large bid.
As strange, and unlikely, as the 10-minute presentation may sound to bidders, it probably doesn’t to many customers.
In this true story that strict 10-minute clock started when a bidder arrived in the lobby. One bidder was down to 6-1/2 minutes by the time they reached the conference room from the lobby. (more…)
May 12th, 2009
Mea culpa.
After writing Process at the Expense of Purpose I realized I was guilty of working a process without defining it’s purpose.
My error was not defining the purpose of this weekly blog, as compared to the monthly articles I publish.
As a result, confusion may have touched some readers, such as:
- Is the weekly blog for facility managers? Procurement? Business unit managers? Or service contractors?
- Are the topics in the monthly articles different than the weekly blog? Why? (more…)
May 7th, 2009
The multitude of social media is overwhelming. And trying to find their use in business to business (B2B) is even more confusing.
For example, what’s all the hoopla about Twitter? (14 million unique visitors in March ‘09, up 1,202% over last year)
What happened to MySpace? (55 million unique visitors in March ‘09, down 11% from a year ago)
Why is Facebook everywhere now? (91 million unique visitors in March ‘09, up 195% over last year )
New social media come and go, rise and fall in popularity, sometimes even before you’ve figured out if they’re worth learning. (more…)
May 3rd, 2009
No, it’s not fair. From time to time we’ll compete against another person for a job or promotion, or another company for a sale and feel they’re making false claims that will help them win.
And it doesn’t matter whether the competitor is intentionally misleading or not. Mom’s not there to sort it out, so we deal with it.
But wouldn’t it feel great, just once, to call out that competitor as a liar? You know it would, come on, admit it. (more…)
April 23rd, 2009
Seth Godin has a way of describing the unseen so that we say “Oh yeah, now I get it”.
But not for me this time. In his post “Blogs, books and the irony of short“ he writes:
“Blogs have eliminated the reason for most business books to exist. If you can say it in three blog posts and reach more people, then waiting a year and putting in all that effort seems sort of pointless.” (more…)
April 17th, 2009
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