ARE YOU READY TO CLOSE?

Some salespeople trick or manipulate their customers to close on a deal.  Trick or manipulative closings are a recipe for miserable customers. Instead it is smarter to set up the conditions for a natural, painless close. Here’s how. Continue reading →

FROM LEADS TO DEALS… HOW TO IMPROVE SALES CONVERSION RATES

Ever seen a salesperson who was excellent at finding potential new customers, yet wasn’t even close to being the company’s top producer?  That’s because finding potential new customers—known as leads—is just the beginning. For leads to benefit the company, they must be converted to sales. Continue reading →

GETTING THE TRUTH FROM CUSTOMERS

Let’s face it: sometimes customers are not completely honest with salespeople.  What’s difficult is that salespeople are limited in what they can do about it.  Unless you don’t plan on doing business with that customer again, you can’t exactly point out that the customer just told a whopper.  With that in mind, it might be useful to identify the most common untruths customers tell – and some advice on how to get to the truth. Continue reading →

Disorganization is costly, wasteful, demoralizing, and begs failure. Your success may hinge on your ability to remain organized, regardless of the financial and emotional pressures work may place on you. Continue reading →

Over the last two weeks, we’ve looked at the sources and causes of workplace stress and positive ways to react to stress, like relieving the anxiety and tension that are a byproduct of stress.  But, perhaps the best way to deal with stress is to stop being tyrannized by your emotions in the first place.  Continue reading →

Last week, we saw that while stress is a normal occurrence, high and continuous levels of stress can be psychologically and physically harmful.  The first step to help deal with stress is to understand the internal and external sources of stress.  Whether stress is internal – your own reaction in anticipation of a problem – or external – from a poisonous work environment or an excessive work load, it is important to find ways to handle stress.  Continue reading →

“Stress” continues to be the number one buzz word circulating around water coolers these days. Those that haven’t lost their job, worry that they will. Those who are still working have seen their workload increase, downtime vanish, and duties expand beyond their expertise (and any conceivable 40-hour work week)… while constantly being reminded about how grateful they should be to even have a job.  Continue reading →

Negotiating the final terms of complex deals can be thorny.  Often, sales professionals find themselves in a situation where the customer holds all the cards. You may have invested time in the opportunity. You may have made a transaction or quota commitment to your manager.  As a result, customers may feel they can simply dictate terms. That’s a recipe for a win-lose outcome, with you and your company the on the losing end of the deal. Continue reading →

You’ve probably heard of Netflix, the online DVD rental-by-mail service.  If you’re one of their ten million subscribers, you’ve probably enjoyed a couple of the two billion videos they’ve mailed out in the past 10 years. It’s a brilliant business concept that has almost single-handedly wiped out video stores in the U.S. (You remember video stores, don’t you? Those were the businesses you supported with all the late fees you accumulated when you forgot to return “Big Bird Goes to China” on time.) Netflix’s genius idea was to let subscribers keep a rented movie as long as they desired, with only a limit on the number of movies that each subscriber can have on loan simultaneously. Continue reading →

In the final installment of our series on using social media for business, let’s look at LinkedIn, which is the most powerful professional networking tool available today. LinkedIn allows you to connect with business contacts and share information in a highly focused way. This is because it features a “gated-access” approach to connections, where contact requires either a preexisting relationship or the intervention of a contact. On LinkedIn, you can only connect to someone you already know or to someone who is “introduced” to you on the site by another connection. This feature serves to build trust among the service’s users and results in contact lists that can be used extensively for business purposes. Continue reading →