Month: November 2009

10 Things to Learn at Your Prospects Website

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So you have found a list of potential customers or a book of list or some other source of prospect leads, what do you do now?

The first thing is to compare the companies on the list to your ideal customer profile and the preferred market or vertical markets who are better suited for your products and services. Discard any companies on the list that are questionable based upon your criteria. If they are larger, public companies, then check them out against sources such as a Hoovers or Dun & Bradstreet (I know D&B owns Hoovers but they keep them separate) or some other independent business research service.

Now for the fun part, it is time for you to check out the prospect companies website. A simple AND difficult process – depends if a company is less than sharing of their information on the web. More often you will find a treasure chest of information on these websites. In fact, there are 12 things that I look for on these sites – and you should look for them also. Here are the big twelve…

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Budget Authority During Tough Times

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Here is a very important sales tips for the understanding what happens during economic downturns. This rule applies to any company or organization experiencing difficult economic times. The cause could be the overall economic conditions like a recession or industry meltdown or it could be an isolated company issue. The key is understand that authority … Read more…

Find New Business in Orphaned Accounts

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During this period of high turnover and layoff rates, have you seen some sales people leave your team and no one has replaced them. This is a possible opportunity to pick up some new business with orphaned accounts. What is an orphaned account? Simple, it is an account with your organization whose sales person of … Read more…

Are You Puking on Customers?

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Now before you get all grossed out from the title of this post, I want to share some important information. My friend and sales guru, Ron Karr, put a video blog post up last week that was, well, outstanding. He uses a term called puking on customer, which as you can imagine is not a … Read more…

Are You Curious Enough?

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Regarding sales people, one trait that I have noticed with the best sales people – including the sales superstars – is the trait of being curious. Why is curiosity important?

Curiosity is the natural need to discover reasons or just information about things we see, hear or touch during the day. For sales people, this is a very positive trait because a curious sales person is one who will ask more questions. More questions leads to new discoveries and information that can impact the progress of the sales process.

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Building Rapport is the Starting Point for Building Trust

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Rapport Building is one of the MOST IMPORTANT things you do as a B2B Sales person. Without the ability to gain rapport, you miss out on the things that really matter in the sales process. Think I’m kidding here?  More sales have been lost because the sales person working an account had no credibility with the decision makers. Why? Because they had lousy people skills and did not think that rapport building was important!

One of the major reasons that rapport building is critical to your sales success is rapport building is the starting point for building trust. And, without Trust, there is no sales, no business, and no renewal business.

Buying decisions are made over 80% of the time based upon this concept of trust. Let me put it another way, if a customer or prospect does not have any trust in you – they will not buy from you. It really is that simple.

Are you good at building trust? I find a number of sales people have become quite arrogant and believe that it is all about the product and service. This leads to competitors enjoying the success of winning sales – at your expense if you are one of the arrogant ones!

There are many things you can do to gain rapport. Here is a short list of rapport building steps…

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