The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

The traditional ABCs of selling were "always be closing." Coffee was only for closers, and closing was a single, major event. The concept of "always be closing" is valid in that it’s important to always be moving the sale forward.

Too Many Pending Lists Give No Indication of the Last Move Forward

Before Google, LinkedIn, or social selling, Steve Marx, founder of The Center for Sales Strategy, taught that closing is a series of small yeses leading to the ultimate yes that confirms the sale.

There was a time when business people needed to be persuaded to get active online. Most of you are already active on social media. The big question now is how to use social media to build your business.

There are moments in every endeavor that will ultimately determine your success. In sales, we teach there are seven steps; three of those involve direct contact with the client or prospect, and those are the three tipping points in the process. While reading The Tao of Leadership, I thought about how this ancient wisdom might also be applied to the sales process.

The three tipping points in sales are getting the appointment, the needs analysis meeting, and confirming your proposal. Let’s look at these through the eyes of Lao Tzu and his ancient advice in the Tao Te Ching, for what he might say today to a salesperson at each step:

In 1996 Motorola introduced a cellular phone you could wear, email surpassed snail mail for the first time, and a computer named “Deep Blue” defeated the world chess champion. In the midst of this technological change, Al Ries published a marketing book entitled Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends On It.

Reis was already considered a marketing thought-leader, having coined the word “positioning” along with Jack Trout. Positioning was used to describe the perception of your brand relative to that of your competitors. 

Whether you’re positioning your company, your department, or just yourself, the wisdom of focus is important to revisit. 

Is it even possible to organize time? Let’s look at six ways we can focus our time on the things that are most important to us. 

1. Consider Current Commitments

Take a look at what you have already committed to doing. Look at each appointment on your calendar and each item on your latest to-do list. What result do you want to see from each commitment? How does each one make you feel when you think about that use of your time? 

We all want to listen better. So why do we find it so hard to do? We are often either thinking too much about what we want to say next or talking too much. 

Let’s look at 6 things we need to remind ourselves to do in order to be a better listener.

Content marketing is already strategic when it's “relevant and consistent" and designed to "attract and retain a clearly-defined audience.” Content marketing has the goal of building relationships and impacting the decisions people make about you.

Content marketing is focused on your target persona. Content strategy looks more at managing the lifecycle of the actual content. Strategy helps you increase your impact and reduce your workload.

The top three social channels being used most often by B2B marketers won’t surprise you, the ones they find most effective may. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are still the top choices. YouTube and Google+ are also substantial for usage. Which channels on the top 10 list below are you using? 

There are many roads to reach annual billing of $1 million. It’s a milestone in many industries. Most account lists are some combination of client levels, but let’s look at three possible scenarios to reach $1 million in billing:

• 1,000 clients spending $1,000 each
• 100 clients spending $10,000 each
• 10 clients spending $100,000 each

The reason to stop and think about your client list this way is that it ends up determining how you spend your time each day and, ultimately, your sales career.

In a recent meeting one of the sales managers asked, “Is it still really valid for salespeople to take a customer-focused selling approach anymore?” At first I was taken aback, wondering what he believed the alternative was, but I soon came to realize that he wasn’t implying that salespeople shouldn’t have the best interest of their clients in mind. What he questioned was the process where you ask for the prospect's time to learn about his or her business so you can sell the right solutions. 

Prospects are no longer willing to give salespeople time to teach them about their business. And with what is now online, they shoudn’t have to.