THE VALUE PROP BLOG
How to Sell to Your Customers When Their Hair Is On Fire
Your customers are in shock. The whole economy has ground to a halt. And yet, there are still sales to be made. Here’s how you can sell to your customers (ethically), even when their hair is on fire.
Recently, I was talking to David Newman, of Do It! Marketing. And on behalf of his clients, he asked me this very hard question: “How can you sell to your customers when their hair is on fire?”
And, oh man, isn’t everyone’s hair on fire...
4 Keys to Keeping Your Sales Alive in Crisis
With business shutdowns happening nationwide, how do you keep your sales alive? There are four things you need to know.
Even before Coronavirus, anyone who is selling knew that you don’t “pitch” a new idea or product as they do on Mad Men. Gone are the days of standing in front of someone for 20 minutes and making your case in such a compelling way that the buyer simply cannot resist.
But now in the midst of Coronavirus, those days are REALLY gone. For one...
How to Negotiate in Crisis—The Right Way
With the world in crisis, business owners find themselves negotiating on every front – from done deals that became undone to rent concessions. Here’s how to negotiate a win-win in crisis.
Negotiating is almost always a pain. There are always many feelings to navigate, wishes and desires to be fought for. Negotiation is never a relaxing activity—especially in a crisis like the pandemic we currently find ourselves in.
In a crisis, time gets shorter. The stakes...
Hiring A Salesperson Is Easy
In a small business, hiring a salesperson is easy...provided that you have great candidates to choose from, an incredibly compelling compensation package, stellar references, and preferably some prior experience with the candidate you’re hiring – so you know for sure they’ll produce.
Oh. You’re not sure you have that all lined up for your next hire?
OK. The simple fact is that working with many business owners and professional sales managers throughout the years,...
The Dangers of Customer Concentration
When our business is doing well, it’s easy to just enjoy the ride and ignore dangers lurking below the surface. But those dangers can emerge at the worst times to deliver damaging blows to our growth, our revenue, and our overall success.
“Customer concentration” refers to the amount of your revenue that relies on a single client. Usually, a business is said to have too much customer concentration if more than 10% of its revenue is reliant on one single client...
Exactly How to Respond to the 7 Sales Objections that Can Kill the Deal
In any serious (complex) sales conversation, objections are bound to come up. You may be tempted to think that objections are big red stoplights – stalling conversations and killing sales. But what if you approached them differently?
To me and most experienced sales professionals, I’ve interviewed over the years, objections are a great sign. It means your prospect is actually considering your offering. Your job isn’t to ignore or sidestep the objections...
3 Keys to Successful First Sales Meetings
You walk into the meeting. It’s your first time meeting this prospect. You go right into the reasons your product/service is the solution to what you assume is their problem. After all, why else would they have agreed to meet with you? You deliver your product benefits perfectly. You said everything you can think of saying…and yet you leave without a next conversation lined up. In fact, you’re even unsure if you made any progress at all.
So, what happened?
Well, you missed...
Better Sales Conversations: Aligning to the Customer’s Buying Process
Alignment is Key
Are you aligning with your customer’s buying process? Do you understand it? Are you accommodating it?
When you’re selling — especially in complex sales — you must consider how the selling organization (that’s you) collaborates with clients to make the evaluation, purchase, installation, and support work as you’re promising. You must have a conversation that focuses on the processes supporting the solution...
6 Tips for Hiring and Retaining Good Salespeople
Here are a couple of realities we’ve all had to face:
- Effective salespeople are rare for the same reason as any great talent in any field. That is, the sales profession requires talent, training, and a managerial context designed for success.
- Smaller companies are working within a constrained budget. The fact is that it is hard to hire someone who you expect to turn a million or multi-million dollars in business, for a $45k or even $75k base. Anyone who...
Dissolving the Friday Mindset: Should You Make the Call?
It’s 3 PM on a sunny and hot Friday in summer. Half of your sales team has been on “lunch runs” since noon and has basically checked out. The other half has already left for the weekend. To put it bluntly, sales are on holiday.
What’s going on here? They’ve bought into the “Friday Mindset.”
You know — the idea that since no one else is really working on a Friday, why should they bother to make calls?...
