In our consulting business we help people sell software for millions of dollars but when it comes to our own business we don’t pay a dime for software. One of the ways the smaller businesses can increase their cost advantage over the bigger guys is the way they use information technology. The corporates are hide bound by all those IT department guys who insist on locally hosted, client server, applications and synchronizing systems on PCs and servers. They come out with all sorts of justification for their “strategy” but usually avoid mentioning their main motivation - self preservation. After all, if the users to ...
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People used to agree “the salesman’s only asset is his Rolodex”. It seems the company still makes this device, but for anybody who doesn’t know it, the Rolodex is a cylindrical device for storing index cards. This was where the salesman stored all his customer contact records. Of course, now we have great technology like Front Office to help us with this task, but in the old days all they had was index cards, and the Rolodex. But the term Rolodex didn’t just mean cards with names and addresses. What they meant by Rolodex was what we would call network – relationships we can ...
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Why is it that people selling things like to deal with the doorman? Ok so, that’s an outrageous exaggeration, but it grabs the attention and illustrates an interesting point – when we’re selling something we tend to feel subservient, as if not worthy of serious consideration. We don’t want to upset anybody by being too pushy. So, we try to sell the doorman, the receptionist, middle managers – anybody but the boss. Obviously this doesn’t apply to people selling to individuals or professionals. They can only talk to the boss, but they still adopt this subservience, and waste time and money. Well here is ...
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Our sales process can seem paranoid about qualification, because it is. Making sure we understand what the customer is thinking is absolutely fundamental to our decision on whether to compete or not. We need to know will it really happen, is there anything we can do to make sure we win, and if we do win is the business going to worth having. It also dictates the way we structure our campaign. It tells us how to win the business. This is true regardless of whether that campaign lasts 18 minutes, or 18 months. Qualification requires some penetrating questions to be asked, and answered. ...
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Generally people seem to do everything they can to avoid sales people, until they get to know them at least. The answer “I sell things” in response to the question “what do you do?” can be a real conversation stopper at social events. The most successful life insurance salesman ever was a disaster until he understood. Whenever he met people at events he would say ‘I sell….” And before he could get the life bit out he was talking to fresh air. Broke and desperate, he decided on a small change to his pitch, and this turned out to make him a very wealthy ...
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