I just attended Jeffrey Gitomer’s seminar for sales managers and leaders.

Before Jeffrey started his presentation, I was chatting with the gentleman next to me who is a VP of Sales. I asked him what kind of sales training he uses.  He said, “Oh, we train our salespeople ourselves.

Salespeople are born, anyway. They either have it or they don’t.”

I couldn’t resist pulling out my copy of Forceful Selling and saying, “That’s interesting you say that. This book says that is one of the myths of sales.”  And I showed him the list of sales myths, including the illustration of the bulldog salesperson who is born with a purchase order in his mouth.

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How can you tell if your sales process is in need of improvement, or if stalled growth is simply a result of the challenging economy?

The sales function and methodologies tend to be poorly understood across most companies. Therefore, companies often focus on measuring easily understood items such as activity and transactions, rather than measuring strategy and methodology, which require expertise and training to be well understood.

However, in most cases a methodology tune-up will result in far bigger performance improvements than pushing the activity throttle. Remember the old saying, “What gets optimized is what gets measured”? Do you want to optimize activity and short-term results? Or, do you want to optimize your competitive strength and sustainable results? Read more

We’ve all taken many sales courses over the years. They all taught us to find the customer’s need, pain or problem and then demonstrate that our product or service is the best solution. They also taught us to find the real decision makers, the people with the power to make the purchase, and essentially make them like us—you know the cliches, “people buy from people they like”. Those approaches worked very well over the last 20 to 30 years and we all made a lot of money using them. But something happened a while ago that has made those techniques as obsolete as a car phone antenna on the rear window of your Bimmer—the Internet.

The Internet, along with today’s blazingly fast fiber optic networks, has put an astounding amount of power in buyers’ hands. Buyers no longer rely on professional salespeople to help them define a solution or determine which is best. In fact, it is not uncommon for buyers to know more about your product and your competitors’ products than you do.

What does that mean for you? Read more

Does it seem harder and harder to get customers’ attention these days? Does your product or service always seem to fall short of being a priority for the customer? What if there were a way to have customers begging to be higher on your priority list, instead of you begging to be on theirs? How would it feel to be with a customer closing a sale and be interrupted by another customer calling you pleading to take their order instead? What would that mean for your business? You can become invaluable to customers and dramatically grow your business, if you change your selling paradigm.

What is the new approach and how do you use it?
The new approach is a change-centric approach. It is the philosophy that the motivation behind every purchase is the desire to make a change—a change that enables the purchaser to achieve a goal. The way you can become a change-centric salesperson is by practicing the five disciplines of change leadership. Read more