sales

Choose the right sales training for your business

Glenn Guilfoyle, Founder & Principal of The Next Level, writes... Spin Selling. Solution Selling. Conceptual Selling. New Conceptual Selling. Professional Selling Skills. The list goes on and on. The Sales sections of bookstores are loaded with them. Since the mid 1980s, professional selling started to garner enough respect to be studied and written about. The Huthwaite group were possibly the early pioneers, and they studied and captured data to analyse a large number of sales interactions across a wide range of industries and sectors. Their work spawned “Spin Selling”, authored by Neil Rackham. At a similar time, READ MORE ›

By Glenn Guilfoyle|Sales|

What’s the role of social media in B2B selling?

Christian Maurer, a Paris-based Consultant, Trainer and Coach, writes... From my own experience, I know that using social media can eat up considerable time, especially in the discovery phase. It is thus legitimate for a sales leader to be concerned about whether the time salespeople spend with social media is time well spent to interact with prospects and customers in a way that generates the revenue streams expected from them. Leaving sales people to their own devices in terms of how to integrate social media into their work practice is the least effective approach and will negatively READ MORE ›

By Christian Maurer|Sales, Tactics|

Understand your value chain

Glenn Guilfoyle, Founder & Principal of The Next Level, writes... I stopped counting and running ratios a few years back now, but at last count around 80% of the B2B sales organisations I asked failed the value chain question. I find myself in workshops with heads of Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, and Operations seeking clarity from the group in terms of identification of their customers by value chain segment with justification as to their nominations. Around 80% of the time the group response falls somewhere between succinct nuances on identities and / or parameters, through to READ MORE ›

By Glenn Guilfoyle|Sales|

Do you really need sales training?

Charles Besondy, President of Besondy Consulting & Interim Management, writes... Is revenue flat or heading south? Time to invigorate the sales force with the latest sales techniques, right? New head of sales takes the reins with the job of transforming the revenue engine. Time to bring in the sales trainers, right? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Upon closer examination, your revenue problem may not be due to a lack of sales skills. The pros at align.me (for whom I am a certified Funnel Coach in North America) can point to case study after case study of clients who READ MORE ›

By Chuck Besondy|Sales, Skills, Strategy|

Don’t ask your Sales Execs to cover too much

Glenn Guilfoyle, Founder & Principal of The Next Level, writes... Many B2B sales organisations unwittingly set up their Sales Execs for mediocre performance by expecting them, via their charter of role breadth, to cover too much. So how does the organisation set the right breadth of accountabilities for the Sales and Service roles? Well, like many such considerations - it depends. There is no one universal answer; not even an industry, sector or channel-specific solution. An unclear set of accountabilities manifests in many organisations as poor customer service, lost sales opportunities and from a customer perspective, a READ MORE ›

By Glenn Guilfoyle|Sales|

Importance of a good VBR

align.me Director, Brett Bonser, explores the importance of a good valid business reason (VBR) - a term coined by global sales performance leader, Miller Heiman... Getting time in someone’s diary is always going to be a challenge. Even when the initiative ought to be a high priority for them - in ‘your eyes.' I want to share a dialogue with you that’s occurred between one of align.me’s US consultants and a User Buying Influence from a target prospect who, we feel, meets our ideal profile. The background: The underlying concept is that vendors and their reseller partners READ MORE ›

By Brett Bonser|Sales|