The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 21 Habits to Become a More Effective Salesperson — HubSpot

What behaviors makes for an effective salesperson, and by extension, a team of effective salespeople? This list, gathered from observing the habits of top salespeople, will help you improve your game.

Sales talent is tough to find. Those who are great at what they do aren’t usually spending their time on job boards. According to a survey from The Adler Group, 15 percent of employed professionals are active candidates pursuing a new opportunity — another 68 percent are open to listening to new opportunities, but aren’t actively looking. So how do you find those talented salespeople you need?

Some sales go from step to step and lead smoothly to an agreement and an order. Other times, things stall and you’re not sure why. It might happen at one of the three tipping points in the sale process. There are many reasons a stall can happen, and there’s a quick way to determine what is helping and what is hindering the process.

At some point in our life, we’ve had someone tell us to draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper, and write all the pros for a decision on one side and the cons on the other. The formal name is a “decision balance sheet.” Ben Franklin was known to use them. What makes this simple exercise effective is that it helps us put on paper what we already know — but haven’t thought enough about. 

Another variation of this process is a force-field analysis. It’s used in social science. Our founder Steve Marx applied it to the sales process. The force field approach looks at the forces that are influencing a situation. It looks to see if they are driving movement toward a goal (helping) or blocking momentum toward a goal (hindering). 

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 9 Strategies for Using Customer Testimonials in Your Content — Content Marketing Institute

We look for and act on (even if subconsciously) social proof in all areas our life – including how we behave and the purchasing decisions we make online. Testimonials are a type of review and social proof. They serve the same purpose (guiding potential customers and helping overcome objections), but they’re different in one big way: Testimonials are sought and selected by you. This means you have full control over which testimonials are used, as well as where and how they are displayed. Here are nine ways to leverage testmonials in your content.

Salespeople are hired to sell. When a salesperson can’t close a deal with a prospect, it can seem as if they’ve failed. The often-quoted idea that a good salesperson can sell anything to anyone is rooted in one of those lingering old-school, outdated ideas that the selling process is a contest to be won at any cost.

It’s true that in every sales process, someone is going to be convinced to say "yes." Either the prospect will say, “Yes, I’ll buy this” or the salesperson will say, “Yes, you’re not going to buy this.” But what gets so many salespeople off-track and spinning their wheels on lousy prospects is the belief that the only right answer is the prospect saying "yes." 

When you have openings on your staff, it's easy to get enamored with a candidate and jump to the finish line. That will always cost you in the long run. Every organization I know takes longer than they should to remove non-performing salespeople. It's just a fact. So you need to hire tough, so you can manage easy. If you hire easy, then you have to manage tough (threaten, push, and poke to get them to do what they should be doing).

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. How to Win Against the Competition — HubSpot

Salespeople and prospects rarely want to talk about the same things. You want to talk about the buyer’s budget, timeline, and role in the decision making process, while the buyer wants to talk about pricing and the nuts and bolts of the product. This conflict is especially clear when your prospect brings up the competition. It would be great to keep the focus elsewhere, but if you say too little (or nothing at all), you’ll miss an opportunity to differentiate. Say too much, and you typically come across as insecure or desperate. To walk this line and ultimately win the deal, follow these six guidelines.

No one ever became successful because of their weaknesses.

Think of any successful person and you’ll realize they became well-known for a single area of strength in spite of the many more weaknesses they had to manage and work around on the way.

When we maximize our talents we find success, and in order to do that we need a very clear understanding of what those talents are. Only then can we match talent to task and put people in the position to do the things they are naturally good at in their job.

Our partnership with Talent Plus—and their extensive research of top performing B2B salespeople and sales managers—has allowed us to clearly define the specific behaviors that separate the best from the rest. This allows us to guide our clients to make smart selection decisions, and then to coach those they hire to maximize their talents and continually increase performance.

But those darn weaknesses… they won’t just go away.

But don't worry! There are three ways to effectively deal with a weakness:

Nearly everyone agrees it’s tougher than ever to get prospects to respond to your approaches, and all sales professionals know that if there is no appointment there is no chance for a sale. In today’s world, salespeople have many means and methods to try to get a quality appointment and all have a place. In fact, we strongly recommend you use multiple messages in multiple media to break through. We outline that in our Don’t Give Up process.

But, let me point out a tool seldom used, which is proving to be very effective in the appointment setting process: sending a letter – in the mail. Yes, I am talking about snail mail. You may be chuckling right now, but before you dismiss the idea think about it for a minute. How many emails do you get a day? (Most people have a three-figure number here.) What happens if you don’t spend time cleaning out your inbox? You know, you are deluged quickly. And when you clean out that inbox, how much time do you spend with emails from people you don’t know, especially one who looks like a salesperson? I thought so.

So, here is another question for you. How many pieces of mail do you receive at your office every day? Hmm. That’s what I thought. Now you can see why something sent in the mail can stand out, right?

But, it’s not as simple as sending a letter. Content matters. Here are some suggestions:

When you first start out in sales, you spend a lot of time learning to sell. After you have been in sales for a long time, you need to flip that and focus on selling to learn. I encourage you to be on the lookout for ways to learn. All the time.

John Wooden once said, "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." In the fast-paced, always-changing world we live in today, you need to take this seriously.