Sale (Photo credit: Gerard Stolk (vers le Mardi gras))

High-Profit Selling. Win the sale without compromising on price. Mark Hunter. 2012. ISBN 9780814420096. This a core book for your sales library on selling value and not discounting on price.  But that’s not all this book is, it is chock full of great sales strategies and the tactics to pull them off.  In a slump , and had a really bad sales call?  Bounce back by calling your best customer and rebuild your confidence.  Torn with what to do with RFPs, here are four approaches that you may want to consider before you do not respond. ie how to win even if you chose to lose the bid. What you want to work through the Christmas to New Years break.   How to get a sale from a buyer on a Friday afternoon.  A very valuable, clearly organized and well written book. A must buy for sales and sales managers.  His blog is a great resource.

Related articles

• Value-Added Selling. How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value not price. Tom Reilly (regnordman.com)
• How to Say It:Business to Business Selling. Geoffrey James. (regnordman.com)
• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
• Bottom-Line Selling. The sale’s professional’s guide to improving customer profits. Jack Malcolm. (regnordman.com)
• Hunter and farmers – it’s time to change sales strategy – A STC Classic (customerthink.com)
• What Great Salespeople Do. The science of selling through emotional connection and the power of story. Michael Bosworth & Ben Zoldan (regnordman.com)
• Sell Now! Adaptive Strategies for Today’s Marketplace.Stacia Skinner. (regnordman.com)
• Pricing and Profitability Management. A practical guide for business leaders. Meehan, Simonetto, Montan & Goodin. (regnordman.com)
• Selling to Sales People With War Stories (frontofficebox.com)

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Sell Now! Adaptive Strategies for Today’s Marketplace.Stacia Skinner.    2011. ISBN 1440533792.   This is a free Kindle book available from Amazon.  I liked it. It covers the basics for sales efficiency as well as giving young and old reps something to work with.  This is a quick but very useful read.  The content gives a good analysis of a sales cycle and why sales conditions change over time. I liked that this book stresses the basics of sales people being proactive and self motivating.

Related articles

• Zero-Time Selling. 10 Essential steps to accelerate every company’s sales. Andy Paul (regnordman.com)
• 6 Powerful Ways to Increase Your Sales in 2012 (rocketbuilders.blogspot.com)
• Bottom-Line Selling. The sale’s professional’s guide to improving customer profits. Jack Malcolm. (regnordman.com)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales (rocketbuilders.blogspot.com)
• The End of Business as Usual. Brian Solis. (regnordman.com)
• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
• [Video] What If You Couldn’t Get Any New Customers? (rocketbuilders.blogspot.com)

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Zero-Time Selling. 10 Essential steps to accelerate every company’s sales. Andy Paul. 2012. ISBN 9781614480501. This short (168 pp) tightly written book punches way above its weight class.  The 10 steps are simple, obvious and elegant. It relates very well to changes we are seeing in the marketplace, changes that negatively impact technology sales.

Why change?  Here is his comment on the buyer’s life today.

“Customer firms are no different from any other business.  Most productivity gains are due to people being pushed to work harder , to increase their output within the same number of hours.   If buyers are stretched thin like everyone else, then it stands to reason that one good avenue for creating value for the customer through the selling process is to reduce the time he needs to spend assembling the information required to make a fully informed decision.”

As a salesperson, do you deserve to be in front of the buyer? Have you done your homework on his industry and his needs plus do you have the product knowledge to answer the most important of their questions immediately?

To make Zero-Time work ( and this is not a quick fix ) sales managers need to be able to measure that:

• 100% of leads are being followed up
• lead follow up time is meeting your set time goals (30 minutes? )
• the salesperson is answering the buyers needs/questions without extra follow-ups?
• weekly reviews with ea salesperson show that:

they are tossing the losers from their pipeline and

selling  the proper solution to the people that need it. (Often this is the researcher/user, not the payer who is  waiting for the users approval/research results.)

This book is recommended to sales people and their managers who want to step up their game in response to the changing selling situations.  One cautionary note to sales managers.  The Sales Lead Black Hole research indicated that the more seasoned/mature salesperson can be expected to react negatively to extra manager attention to lead follow-up. See below. (full post)

We also find that as sales reps become more experienced, they are less likely to:

1. pursue marketing-generated leads,
2. respond positively to managerial tracking of marketing lead follow-up, or
3. respond positively to greater marketing-generated lead volume.

Thus implementing a change to your program means more than a Jean Luc Picard “Make it So” .

You will need to think this through and work together with your star performers first.

Related articles

• Sales Training: Value Propositions Continued (rocketbuilders.blogspot.com)
• 4 Ways Marketing Automation Will Shorten Your Sales Cycle (hubspot.com)
• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
• Implementing a Value Based Sales Approach – Part 4 of 4. Some sales training ideas (regnordman.com)
• Sales Contests: How do you Focus on the Right Things? (rocketbuilders.blogspot.com)

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Value-Added Selling. How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value not price. Tom Reilly. 3rd ed. 2011. ISBN 9780071702683.  This is the complete sales book for anyone who wants to break out of the zero sum game of selling on price.  Great point in the book- when asked, a majority of B2B customers see that 25% of the value of the products they buy comes from the salesman himself. Ask yourself, what have you done to deserve to take the meeting with the high value prospect? have you done the work to bring value yourself?

This is a  very current salesman’s bible.  Plus its a  very practical easy to read guide to getting the job done whether you are a part of a huge well supported multinational team or a single sales guy in a start up.  He starts where you need to and has lots of guidance for the sales person who has been forced into a price only style but wants to move to selling value ( the smarter way).  A must have for a sales manager and a salesperson who wants to be a high earner.

If selling on price has you or your organization trapped in a cycle of tightening of margins and unrelenting price pressure then this book is essential to your sales team and will be  a very valuable resource for you.

Related articles

• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
• Implementing a Value Based Sales Approach – part 3 of 4. What sales must do. (regnordman.com)

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Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. 2011. ISBN 9780071760409. This is the right stuff for selling.  Well organizer, very readable with good sidebars from in the field.  This is a short pithy collection of best practices in sales at every stage of your development.  I always find something useful in every sales book and this one is chock full of great ideas, statements and responses. Worth reading all of it and then keep it as a reference. You will use it.

Related articles

• Sales Training Buyers and Companies Blog (customerthink.com)
• 7 Common Sales Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them (quicksprout.com)
• Live person selling can be more profitable than web orders (valueacceleration.wordpress.com)
• Strengths Based Selling. Tony Rutigliano & Brian Brim. (regnordman.com)
• Come On – Lets Be Honest Here Salespeople (kevinkellyohio.wordpress.com)
• B2B: Fresh Ideas to Reignite Stalled Leads and Accelerate the Sales Funnel (bjconquest.com)

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The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. Wayne Breitbarth. 2011. ISBN 9781608320936.  This is a true how to do book, with enough why attached that the reader can understand the power of this tool.  A comment I picked up on was:  ignoring LinkedIn now  is like 10 years ago ignoring email. There is only one way to learn to find out how useful it can be.  He  splits the book in two, first making yourself easy to find ( fill in a proper profile)  and then how to find and approach others on LinkedIn.  Every person in any business can make good use of this book.  Buy it, read it and use it. Well written and a quick read.

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• How To Formulate an Effective LinkedIn Strategy (tosachamber.org)
• Strategies for LinkedIn Success for Small Businesses in Ventureneer Webinar (prweb.com)
• Belden To Do LinkedIn Presentation for Spalding University Alumni (prweb.com)
• LinkedIn to Offer Marketers More Value via ‘Follow Company’ Feature (hubspot.com)
• Pleasant Hill Chamber to Host Social Media – LinkedIn Business Building Workshop August 10 (prweb.com)
• L4B 5: 6 More Ways to Power Lead Generation via LinkedIn (blogs4bytes.wordpress.com)
• How to Get More Leads With LinkedIn By Using My Simple Learn, Lurk and Link Strategy (customerthink.com)
• How Many LinkedIn Connections Should I Have (edenchanges.wordpress.com)
• L4B 6: 7 Step Approach to Generate Leads via LinkedIn (blogs4bytes.wordpress.com)
• Do the Work! Overcome resistance and get out of your own way. Steven Pressfield. (regnordman.com)

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How to Generate Real Sales Results from Digital Tools Like Social Media, Webinars and e-Content

Best Practices for Using Leading Edge Tools for Sales Success.

I am measured on results.  At Rocket Builders we have found that today’s digital tools give us those results.

- most sales people have not been successful using social media to generate revenue

- most webinars fail to engage the prospect sufficiently to advance the opportunity

- most content a salesperson shares with a prospect raises more questions than addresses the buyer’s needs

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The first three parts of this series  have talked about the shift required in selling  today due to buyers having the power to decide when they will interact with you.  I also talked about the work that marketing and sales have to do to get ready to sell on value not price. This part discusses some of the training that has worked to change habits and beliefs.

In our training implementations we use short role playing (recorded) as part of the regular sales meetings. Each play has a short focus topic which is aligned with new or updated supporting assets.  Very quickly we find no lack of sales volunteers/commentators to play out and critique the
roles (sales people are so shy). Humor is important here.

Having the session recorded allows the client to build up a sales training library /resource for those who want to review on their own time. (This helps the salesperson who is on the road and misses a meeting)  The role playing goal is to clearly indicate the gap between preferred and poor approaches.  Some of popular topics have been:

• Buyers lie and other tales for sales virgins (discounting/negotiation)
• Beware the premature proposal, practise safe selling (discounting/knowledge)
• What buyers really mean when they say, “Your price is too high.” (negotiation)
• How buyers go to school on you. (negotiation)
• Fight the urge to broadcast in presentations, we are not the BBC (Communication skills)
• Do you deserve to take the meeting? (Knowledge of the customer)
• The customer does not care about you and that’s a good thing (Value and results)

The organization needs to be focussed on value not volume for this change to work.  If value selling is  new to the company, your market may have been trained to respond to pricing (allowing your product to be commoditized). Fixing this is a separate topic which others have addressed. (Nagle et al)

There is more information on pricing and value in the following series of posts.

Leverage Point

What can you do about pricing for value ?

The intent in this series was to give the reader a different  POV  showing a way out of the declining returns from push marketing and selling. By looking  first at the buyers process and meeting their needs all through in the process, marketing and sales teams are better positioning your company for higher profits and shorter sales cycles.  By adopting this approach a company is also setting themselves up as being different from the others in the  marketplace.  This also adds to your competitive position.

My warning is that this takes hard thoughtful work and attention to the details in execution.  Doing this poorly will leave you worse off than not doing it all.  Doing this well will just make you all very wealthy.

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Social Marketing to the Business Customer. Listen to your B2b market, Generate major account leads and build client relationships. Paul Gillin & Eric Schwartzman.  2011. ISBN 9780470639337.  Timely, current and very well written this is the book you have been waiting for to dish up how and why you can leverage social media through the entire buying cycle.  I was very impressed with their chapters on  Getting ROI and Generating Leads. In our two courses, Content marketing and Digital Tools for Sales we use very similar approaches to the topics covered in this book.  The two authors are old hands at this and technology marketing, so their advice is immediately usable while helping build good plan for long term sales growth.   If you read one book this year on this topic , make it this one.

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• Book Review: Social Marketing to the Business Customer (davefleet.com)
• Social Marketing to the Business Customer: Listen to Your B2B Market, Generate Major Account Leads, and Build Client Relationships (incrmedia.wordpress.com)
• 7 Back-to-School Must-Reads for the Business Bookworm (mpdailyfix.com)
• How Praetorian Put Fire Into Their Facebook Page (readwriteweb.com)
• Getting hands-on with social media comes to London in September (nevillehobson.com)
• My interview with Paul Gillin on SEO (mikemoran.com)
• How a Social Media Pro Educates the “Digitally Illiterate” (thecustomercollective.com)
• Three Views on B2B and Social Media in 2011 (johnbell.typepad.com)
• 6 Smart Steps to Mastering Engagement with Your Target Audiences [SPONSORED] (mashable.com)

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Selling is harder every day. This topics series is presented to help you better meet the challenges of resisting discounting and over time increasing your prices)

Selling processes/methods/tactics that were successful become less so over time. Marketplace noise increases daily.  The standard practise of push marketing plus outbound sales adds to the noise with targets increasing their use of a Delete key. In order to get to talk to a prospect about how a  product
or service brings value, sales needs high quality help from marketing and different sales skills.

This change is necessitated by a market power shift. Power in the process has shifted to the buyer, because the seller is no longer the sole source of information for the purchase.  Buyers have ready access to a sea of information about products through the Web. Buyers determine when and how the
seller will interact with them.

In my own case, I  receive numerous mail and phone requests every day for “just a few minutes of your time to discuss a new product or service that will bring benefit to your business“. Delete.  I need to be engaged by the sellers content and knowledge of my situation before I will respond.

Many sales and marketing teams still misunderstand this point, wasting millions of dollars yearly of  internal funds. If a selling company was effective in fixing this they would experience:

1. Marketing having ongoing conversations with their target market
2. The bulk of the sales conversations would be initiated by the buyer.
3. The momentum of the sales cycles would be increasing (shorter cycles)
4. Reduction  of the cost of sales and
5. Rising profits.

In our consulting practise we see the opposite happening for many companies.

Any modern selling process (what the seller does) now takes a distant back seat to fully the knowing the buyer, the  buyer’s (hidden) process (what the buyers do) and the value the seller brings during the  buying process. This is a sea change in how many previously successful sales people have been trained.

(In part 2 I describe one of the changes needed – in marketing )

Your comments and examples are welcomed.

Related articles

• Marketing Automation is Not the Magic Bullet for Your Sales Issues (regnordman.com)
• E-Selling and buying (cash-bandit.com)
• The Future of Buyer Personas is Social – Part 2 (customerthink.com)
• Adopting a Buyer-Focused Marketing Model (reportcontentwriter.wordpress.com)