The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

• Identify
• Select
• Discover
• Advise
• Close

… just to hear "NO!"

What Happens When a Client or Prospect says NO? What’s Next?

This is the last video of the three-part series on time management. In the first video, I touched on how to identify and eliminate distractions that are getting in the way of your productivity. In the second video, I talked about ways you can prioritize and organize all of the various tasks and goals that you need to accomplish—both at work and at home—to create that work-life balance. 

Today, I'm going to talk more about what Hubspot says takes up 13 hours of our week on average: EMAIL. 

We need email. It's not like we can do without it altogether. It's essential in our business communication, and many of us rely on it for our personal communications as well. So, what can you do to help minimize distractions by email alone to help you with time management?

We all have needs, and those needs drive us to spend time and money addressing them. In sales, we count on the needs of our prospects and clients to motivate them to buy. For decades, it has been a good sales process to focus on client needs. Needs are good, but they are not the complete picture.

Learning about client needs used to set the better salespeople apart from the package pushers.

On a personal level, we don’t focus on our needs to solve a problem. We focus on what we want. When we’re hungry, we focus on getting food, when we’re tired we focus on getting some sleep, and if we need to hit a goal this quarter, we focus on getting the next sale.

Selling a new target account is not an easy task. Many things have to fall in place—here’s a list of some of the obstacles:

• Selecting a quality prospect.
• Developing the trust of the prospect.
• Getting an appointment.
• Conducting a needs analysis that leads to an opportunity (and cash).
• Developing a solution robust enough to get results, yet not so large it scares away the prospect.
• Overcoming objections.
• Closing the deal! 

Getting a renewal from a new customer starts with getting results on the initial campaign, and using a campaign launch brief will set you up to increase your renewals before your clients’ campaigns even kick off.

Today, I'm sharing part 2 of this 3-part series on time management. The first topic I touched on was distractions and helping to identify your own distractions to minimize those that are costing you the most productivity in the workplace.

Today, I want to talk about organization, and primarily, prioritization, and how this can benefit you both at home and at work. 

At The Center for Sales Strategy, LeadG2, and Up Your Culture, we are firm believers in work-life balance. It's extremely important to the health of the organization and to your health as an individual contributor to the organization. It benefits you to maintain that work-life balance, and make sure you're creating that organization and prioritization on both sides of the equation.

Frustration sets in when you look at all the pending business you have sitting in your sales funnel and realize that a good portion of it has been there for weeks! Those prospects you were sure were going to sign off on your proposal right away are instead sharing reasons why they’re not ready or telling you they need more time to think it over. You know that with every week that passes, the chances that any of them will turn into a sale diminishes greatly and you’re kicking yourself because you are now reduced to emailing your prospect with the subject line "Checking in" since you really have no other options left.

Are you experiencing this uncomfortable, bloated feeling right now?

That bloated pipeline isn’t just uncomfortable . . . it’s frustrating and, ultimately, very expensive. Yes, it can sometimes feel rewarding to say you have “a lot out there,” but we all know that pending business is only good if it ends up closing. 

Spoiler alert: This is not an article on how to close your pending deals. It’s way more valuable than that. 

The problem is not in the proposal or the funnel, but rather with the process.

I spend a lot of time giving pre-hire feedback to managers about candidates. We discuss managing strengths and coaching weaknesses. We talk about how strengths and weaknesses can work together or can tug in opposite directions. 

At the end of each conversation, it's my sincere hope that the hiring manager has a well-rounded view of their candidate and how they will “fit” or “don't fit” in a position. But there is another question that needs to be asked. Does the candidate also fit the manager? 

A lot of salespeople and managers that I talk to on a regular basis often seek advice on time management and how they can better manage their time.

The truth is... it really depends. It varies depending on you, your individual style, your talents, and the way you like to process things. 

In this 3-part series, I'm going to share various time management tips and things to consider based on your style and what will work for you.

Today, I'm touching on is distractions. 

Simple life lesson: One of the best ways to find exactly what you need is to know exactly what you’re looking for.

We regularly work with hiring managers and recruiters to clearly define the role they are working to fill so they know exactly what they need for superstar performance. This morning I received an email from a sales manager asking which talents he should look for to hire a strong sales hunter. Great question! So good, in fact, I thought I’d share my response with you.

I've worked with thousands of salespeople over two decades now, and it's interesting that so many salespeople are still afraid to have candid discussions about the results a client is seeking and how well what they have sold them is working.

Many sellers wax eloquently about the features and benefits of their product, and especially why it’s a much better value than the competition. At the end of the day, whether or not you get an order, and certainly whether or not you keep your client onboard for a long time, depends on the results you deliver—even if the person you sell to never mentions it.

It’s the sales leader’s job is to pay attention to both what is working and what is not working in the sales department and to make the appropriate adjustments so that the sales force has the best possible chance for success. To do that, the sales leader must pay attention to several things including sales process, sales activity, sales analytics (KPI’s), and of course, the customer.

In fact, paying attention to the customer is perhaps the most important of them all. In recent years, the way that customers have been engaging with sales has changed significantly. If you are a sales leader and you have not adapted the way you run your sales department, then you might find yourself slowly starting to lose ground to the competition.

This is the fifth and last post in the series, "How to Get the Most Out of Your Sales Team." Check out other posts in this series - linked at the bottom of this blog post.

I'm back again for the fifth week to talk about ways you can get the most out of your sales team, and this week I'm talking about sales gamification.

Sales gamification is one of the hottest trends going in the world. Everyone wants to "gamify." It's what "the kids are doing." And as silly of a buzzword that it is, it's actually a pretty good idea to motivate your sales team and get the most out of them. 

What is sales gamification? It makes your daily activities into some kind of game. You want to motivate and get the most out of your team? You need to do this.