Jan
6
Up Marketing’s Creek without a Paddle
After SAM 1990 hit bookstores, it seemed only a matter of time before Corporate America would awake to the demographics-driven transformation of the marketplace just getting underway as the last decade of the 20th century was beginning. Articles about the aging of America began showing up everywhere. Ken Dychtwald’s Age [...]
Jan
5
ConocoPhillips
Focus. You cannot go everywhere and do everything if you expect to perform well.
“I learned a powerful leadership secret when I was in the United States Marine Corps. It was called the Five Ps: Prior planning prevents poor performance.
“Whether in the military or in business, preparation is critical,” says Archie Dunham. “One [...]
Jan
4
Once we are measuring the right things, and we know we are working the right opportunities, we can start to apply specific techniques for accelerating our customer’s buying process. Please let me emphasize, we are not talking about pushing customers to buy before they are ready. All of these suggestions are put forth as a [...]
Jan
3
One very common measure that companies use to gauge sales velocity is the average length of a sales cycle. This is normally measured in the number of days it takes to work an opportunity through the sales pipe- line and close the deal. There is a big difference, however, between shortening sales cycles and accelerating [...]
Jan
2
Do you want to increase sales revenue? There are two ways to do it. One is to increase sales velocity by increasing the number of opportunities that flow through our sales pipeline and ‘close’ in any particular month or quarter. If we put twenty deals through the pipeline last quarter, and we were able to [...]
Jan
1
So, how do you get past the low-level gatekeepers and get access to the higher levels? Here are a few proven techniques you can leverage to ‘make the little sale’ of why you deserve to meet your customer’s boss, their boss’s boss, and the senior executives of the company. Most of these techniques leverage concepts [...]
Dec
31
We should go into every meeting, or every phone call, with the intention, and the expectation, of earning access to other people within the company, and especially at higher levels. Starting with the first meeting, use the techniques we have discussed, and a few more still to come, to try to get beyond the person [...]
Dec
30
I believe it helps to put ourselves in the shoes of the lower-level person in order to understand the dynamic of what and whom we are dealing with. The reason a gatekeeper is a gatekeeper is that he or she has been given a specific job to do. One type of gatekeeper is the administrative [...]
Dec
29
If we don’t at least attempt to meet with the key executives proactively, but instead wait until an opportunity finds us, we are often stuck selling bottom-up. Once they call us, we lose the chance to be proactive, we end up reacting to opportunities, and it’s possible to lose a great deal of control over [...]
Dec
28
I recommend a proactive strategy when it comes to reaching executive- level decision makers. We should start today to reach out to every C-Level executive within every existing company we sell to, as well as within our best prospective new customers. If what you sell has no relevance to some of these C-Level executives, then [...]