Sales people talk or send e-mails to customers and prospects all day long. They make sales presentations, handle objections, quote price and delivery, write proposals, and close orders. After a while it almost becomes automatic or second nature since this is what sales people do. Yet, sales people probably don’t think of themselves as acting…
Let’s turn the table and look at selling and ethics from the customers’ perspective. Trust me, buyers know unethical behavior when they see it and they keep score. What does unethical selling look like if you are the buyer? • Misrepresenting the product’s specifications, warranty, or capabilities. • Bashing the competition (warranted or not). •…
I received a flood of responses about my recent blog on “Ethical Selling”. Most were private e-mails from sales people who have had to defend their ethics. For many, the most frequently confronted issue was the company’s need for more sales versus the code of ethics of the individual sales person. Others wrote about the…
For most of us, knowing the difference between right and wrong is pretty clear, but sometimes doing the right thing is hard to do. Or, let’s say we are challenged to make the right choices. Our government helps us out with our decision making process about right and wrong by making laws that specifically tell…
Understanding your customer’s needs is a critical step in the sales process; if you understand this, you are empowered to construct the best possible solution for their problem. Without this information, you are just doing guesswork. With this knowledge, you can personalize your solution by emphasizing the fit of your offering with the customer needs.…
“Let me think about,” says your customer. This is the dreaded “no hurry” response, which is one of the most frustrating selling situations that you can encounter in sales. You have answered all the questions, handled all the objections, and determined that the fit with your offering is good. Still, there is no decision. There…
A common lament from many sales people these days is the difficulty that they have in getting their customers to call them back or answer emails. This applies to prospects and even regular customers. Sales people worry that if they call too much they will be perceived as a pest or as unprofessional or, even…
Ever wondered what is going on in the heads of top sales people? Like most high achievers, top sales people manage their thoughts with discipline and optimism. They do things differently from the rest of the team.
Years ago a very wise sales manager asked me, “What is the single most important factor in selling?” Dumbfounded by the question, I sat in awkward silence. Sensing my quandary, he answered his own query with two simple words, “Being remembered”. I quickly nodded yes, but I did not really know what he meant.
Escalation is a dirty trick played when one party has leverage or when there is still money on the table. Essentially, escalation is when a deal is almost done and one of the parties reopens the negotiation with a demand for one more concession.