There may no more powerful communication tool than a story well told. A story is not a PowerPoint presentation or a canned pitch or a memorized speech. It is as it sounds: a plain English parable with a beginning, middle, and end. Stories help people understand and make sense of what you are selling. A…
Sometimes in sales, you have to give bad news to customers. While this is never easy, a little preparation goes a long way to helping you get the job done. Start by gathering all the facts and preparing yourself emotionally. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes—how would you feel when delivered this bad news? Here…
While at the NXTcomm tradeshow in Las Vegas this week, I had the opportunity to shake hands with dozens of people. The first person I shook hands with offered me a weak and clammy hand, which repulsed me. It got me thinking about this simple greeting and its importance in building and maintaining relationships. Here…
For many of us in sales, it is an everyday occurrence to conduct sales meetings on a conference call with participants from multiple locations. While this can be a terrific way to communicate to multiple people in different locations, the call can be ruined by music on hold, shuffling papers, dogs barking, and background conversations.…
Body language helps us communicate whether or not we are aware of it. A recent university study on how people receive information had the following results: – 55% of what we learn from others comes from their body language (mostly from the eyes) – 38% of what we learn from others comes from their tone…
E-mail communication with customers can be efficient and easy, but it is easy to fall into a bad habit of only using e-mail to handle customer inquiries. If your goal is to build better relationships with your customers, the telephone may be a better tool. While talking on the phone can be can be stressful…
Gift giving practices vary from industry to industry, but an appropriate gift is a great way to say thank you and can help solidify a relationship between customer and provider. The operative word is “appropriate”. Appropriate gift giving has these key elements: 1. The gift is well timed. 2. The gift is meaningful or relevant…
E-mails dominate B2B communication. E-mail volume dwarfs that of the telephone, fax, and direct mailer. If you are like me, you are getting dozens if not hundreds of e-mail messages a day; most are spam and are deleted. The rest are scanned or put aside to be read later. The truth is most don’t get…
If you deal with difficult or angry customers on the phone, you know that the biggest problem is that they tend to go on and on, don’t listen, and dominate the conversation, which means you can’t get a word in edgewise. This consumes lots of time, and of course, it’s hard to help a customer…
I get this question a lot from sales veterans who remember what selling was like before the Internet. My answer is that things are different with some aspects of selling harder and other parts easier. The biggest change in selling is the rise of the better informed buyer. Prior to the web, buyers had fewer…