All Blog Posts from Sales Machine
Make 2012 your best year: Prepare this holiday
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KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images)
I feel like Scrooge about this time of the year. The lack of sales progress in the holiday and pre-holiday season can be maddening. For business-to-business sales people the action tapers off for the 6 weeks between the Monday before Thanksgiving and the Monday after New Year's Day. The business community goes into decision-making, phone call returning, email-responding hibernation and sales people are left to grumble.
Here are 3 things you can do to set yourself in a great position for the next year's sales plan and avoid losing your mind:
Continue »How to write a winning proposal
First, a simple belief that I have: A proposal should never be a Christmas present that the recipient opens and is surprised by.
Proposals are best when they are the recorded specifics that have already been agreed to. That means that if you want to write a winning proposal, you are putting on paper what your decision-maker already understands.
If that is the case, then for whom are you writing the proposal? Everyone who can screw up your deal! When you are writing a proposal, you are incorporating all that has been discussed, considered and debated through the sales process into one document.
Continue »Need edge on competition? Look at sales numbers
In "Moneyball," author Michael Lewis describes how the Oakland A's management built a successful team by looking at the numbersl differently. They had to: Theirs was the smallest payroll of all the teams, and if they calculated potential the same way as everyone else, they would have been outbid for every player.
It's fascinating to me that a sport that had been around for more than100 years and is one of the most statistically studied still had secret gems to be discovered and exploited for remarkable performance. The same is true for sales management. There are gems of information to be gathered in your current systems that will give you winning insights you can exploit to improve your performance.
Continue »How to get what you need from your contact's boss
How to compete against giant corporations--and win
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photo courtesy of flickr djshaggy cc)
4 tips to get your email read--and answered
Face it: Lots of people aren't reading your emails. There are just too many to keep up with every single one of them. But here are some steps you can use to increase the odds that yours will be one of those that gets answered.
Seal the deal without offering the lowest price
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Photo courtesy of flickr Sarabbit cc)
Recently, a reader asked me how to prevent losing deals based on price. "The client or prospect tell us they want us to win," he writes, "but then we lose on price. Any suggestions?" Actually, I have quite a few.
Continue »The new rules on dressing for success
I have a number of super-successful Silicon Valley clients who dress in ripped denim, Vans shoes and t-shirts. They are worth hundreds of millions, even more, but it's a status symbol to dress like you're homeless to attend board meetings.Conversely, I have worked with trash-hauling company executives who dress in suits and ties every day of the week. And this contrast shows the dramatic shift that has occurred in business attire in recent years, as each industry has developed its own rules.
Sell a lot and have your customers love you
Jeffrey Gitomer
If you want to know how to build customer loyalty while also achieving mega-sales, there is perhaps no better person to talk to than Jeffrey Gitomer. The author of The Sales Bible, The Little Book of Leadership and many other best-selling books, he also has consulted to many Fortune 500 companies and is a sought after speaker, inducted to the National Speaker Association's Speaker Hall of Fame.
The fine art of managing up
Welcome to the new Sales Machine blog on CBS MoneyWatch. I have been offering sales advice through my blogs on BNET, now part of MoneyWatch, as well as my books and speeches for years now, and I'll be sharing the same advice under a new banner here. My background includes taking 4 companies from less than $10 million in annual sales to more than $100 million in less than five years in each case, through selling large accounts. Your questions and input on real sales scenarios will make this a rich conversation, so when you want to talk about something, post it here and I'll respond.
What I want to address today are sales managers' personality types and how to get along with each. Having experience with hundreds of sales managers at countless companies, I've observed there are five basic types. Of course, you need to be cautious when categorizing people, which is why so many employers use assessment tools like Myers-Briggs. But I can't test your sales manager. So based on my experience, I'll tell you the five types and how to work most effectively:
Super Hero
He saves the day, rescues the sale and keeps the at-risk client happy. Often this manager was a very successful salesperson who was promoted into this leadership role. You can tell that your boss is a Super Hero if he wants to solve every selling problem by joining you on the sales call; he constantly tells you what you "should" have done or do and wants you to use his exact words or approach and treat accounts in which he is involved as more important than other accounts.
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