The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Here are the 5 most visited blog postings we published this month.  Have a great Friday and good luck with your planning for next week.

I wasn't expecting an epiphany.  It was just a late night stop to fill up my gas tank. As I drove away I had a certain feeling of satisfaction as I looked at the gas gauge. Maybe it's because I know if you let your car run out of gas, you'll be walking a lonely road. 

Recently, I was talking with a salesperson about his initial approach to prospective customers. He couldn’t seem to get folks interested in having a conversation with him. He was hearing the immediate brush off of “no thanks, not interested” soon into every cold call. While this is common, there are specific tactics that can warm up cold calls enough to get prospects to take your call, and even set aside time by scheduling an initial call.  My call with this particular rep was to share some of those tactics and best practices to help him experience more success during his initial approach.

My competitive nature to be the best, along with a perfectionist, Type A personality that many marketers and sellers have – oftentimes lead me down the path of over-thinking and over-working every little detail. This meant every email had to be crafted flawlessly, and presentations would sometimes come home with me to be worked on and perfected for the following day’s meeting. I sometimes obsessed over the right words to use with a client and avoided mistakes like the plague.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I love my boss or I love my sales manager?” I would venture to guess you could probably count on one hand the number of times you’ve heard this proclamation. 

You should be jealous of me this week. I received an amazing thank you card from a client for whom I had created a custom sales meeting to help launch an important project. 

I'm a bit of a neat freak—ok, maybe more than a bit.  So I love Spring cleaning—inside the house and out.

Online video shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, in fact YouTube gets more than one billion unique visitors each month who watch over four billion hours of video each month.   With those kinds of numbers,

Do you own one of those fans, where the first speed on the dial is the top speed?  At first, this annoyed me.  But I have come to realize that this design is meant to help me make the right choice.  When you live in Florida and the heat rolls in—it's a good idea to go with more air.  

We all know it's important to talk early and often about what your clients expectations are. After you identify a true client need is the time to start talking about expectations.

A client recently asked me to provide some feedback on his LinkedIn page. With more and more attention being given to social media, and the way it can enhance an individual’s personal marketing efforts, he wanted to make sure he was “looking good.”

Here are the 5 most popular downloaded documents for 2013 so far. Have a great Friday and good luck with your planning for next week.

I think you will agree with me that your success in securing appointments will be directly proportionate to how compelling your message is to your prospect.  We always recommend you develop a very strong valid business reason regardless of how you deliver it.

Some of the most important steps in your sales strategy should include asking the right questions and uncovering a client or prospect's true needs. Only then can you provide customized solutions.

Here's a scenario you might find familiar: “Sales of the new eFrammus haven’t been going as well as the company has forecast,” the sales manager said as he opened his regular Monday morning meeting. “So we really need to bear down on that product line and start moving more right away.”