Insights

27/09/2016 | Skills

• There’s no escaping that activity drives results. If you don’t know which the key sales activities are and how much of each you need you’re managing by hope – and hope is not a strategy!  
• Nobody, but nobody buys on price. They make a price-value judgment based on their perception of value – not yours!
• Whilst not exactly a science neither is good sales practice all ‘smoke and mirrors.’ It’s always the process that makes any sales happen in the first place and then allows it to be scaleable and repeatable in the future.
• Fact-finding is a misnomer. In selling it’s about seeking emotion, not logic since logic might make someone think but only emotion will make them act!
• In selling as in medicine, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.
• If you don’t set and successfully communicate the right focus for a sales force, you’ll end up with the customer base they want rather than the one you do.
• If you can’t describe what your customers receive when your business does what it does – it won’t be doing it long!
• In a strong enough wind even a turkey can fly! But it won’t blow forever.
• Selling always has a binary outcome. You can’t win 60% of a deal so it rarely makes sense to factor a pipeline that way.
• Sending a proposal doesn’t automatically increase your chances of winning a deal. Accurate forecasting isn’t simply a function of the stage you’ve reached in the sales cycle.
• Most people would agree that selling is a numbers game. The problem is most of them don’t know what the numbers are!
• Genuine sales management has only 2 functions: to manage today’s resource to deliver today’s results and develop the resource necessary to deliver tomorrow’s. Too much time on the former will undoubtedly lead to failure in the latter.