Oct
29
Early in my career, I took a sales position with a small technology reseller that sold software and hardware systems primarily to manufacturing companies. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for a workstation and a single-user license of software to run well into six figures. So, almost every sales opportunity required us to get involved [...]
Oct
25
It seems almost comical now to read some of the literature of the late 1990s in which some predicted the end of the sales profession as we know it. Many were convinced that once companies could buy everything they would ever need over the Internet, once they could look at a spec sheet and a [...]
Oct
24
There may well be characteristics about your company or your products that frankly aren’t that impressive. If we know there is the potential for an objection or issue with something about our company, our people, and our solutions that we can’t change, then by all means let’s prepare to handle it before it comes up.
There [...]
Oct
23
In our workshops we teach a technique we call ‘Intelligent Positioning,’ which makes this concept of how your customer perceives value incredibly useful. We teach participants to start out every introductory meeting with questions. Some of the questions are designed to reveal our customer’s business disparity. Others are meant to discover more about their desired [...]
Oct
21
Part of our job as sales professionals revolves around our ability to understand how customers think. The more we can understand the way our customers perceive value, the better we can position our solutions to help them derive the value that they seek. It is important for us to remember that . . .
Customers don’t [...]
Oct
15
When a customer is faced with a significant buying decision, one in which there are many options of what to buy and who to buy from, there are always at least three different variables they take into consideration. I call these the three major Sources of Value. The first I will call the solution. It [...]
Oct
5
There are at least eight major kinds of value that your customer may be interested in deriving from a relationship with you and your company. Now, there could actually be sixteen or twenty-seven, but there are at least eight. Some of them are tangible and measurable, and others exist only in your buyer’s mind. I [...]
Oct
4
Despite our best efforts to define and quantify value, the process of valuation remains very subjective. There are standards that can be used to quantify the economic value of an asset (normally based on the cash flow that the asset can be used to produce over a certain period of time), but there is no [...]
Oct
3
There is an equation that governs commerce, and business in general, that we need to understand backward and forward. I call this the ‘Value Equation’ because at its most fundamental level . . .
Buying and selling is trading one kind of value for another.
Our customers need the functional capabilities that our products and services can [...]
Oct
2
The issue of handling and overcoming objections always seems to be a hot topic among the sales teams I work with, and I have included several proven techniques for dealing with objections in How Customers Perceive Value and Risk and Accelerating the Buying Process. But the best way, by far, to deal with an objection [...]