The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

You've spent weeks trying to get a meeting with an important prospect, you've gotten past the gatekeepers and have given him or her a valid business reason (VBR) to have a meeting with you. You're halfway through the presentation that you worked on for hours over the weekend, and your prospect stops you dead in your tracks with a question you have never heard before. What do you do? Do you fake it? Do you dance around the question and minimize it?

If you are truly looking to better yourself as a salesperson and to make a solid and lasting client relationship, you don’t do any of those things mentioned above. You stop and turn to your prospect and say, “That’s a great question and one I have never heard before. I don’t know, let me get back to you."

It might not work on a test in college or in politics, but admitting you don’t know the answer to a question in business can work to your advantage in 3 ways. The first way is that it gives you the opportunity to follow up with your prospect after the meeting with information the person is interested in receiving. Secondly, it gives you a chance to display your expertise in a well-thought-out manner. And lastly, it helps you build credibility and trust (especially if you follow up in a timely manner). Let’s look at how each of these ways can benefit you.

We've come to the end of the week, and we're sharing the top articles and resources we've read this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Deliver Feedback That Sticks — Harvard Business Review

The secret of effective feedback is making it feel like the message is coming from an ally, not an adversary. But this is easier said than done. This article offers practical steps to make sure you're delivering feedback in a way that shows you're on the same team.

Most times when you find yourself at a crosswalk, you simply stand in front of the "don't walk" signal, and the light will eventually say "walk." Sales can be a lot like that. You just show up often enough and someone eventually buys something.  

At important, busy intersections, corners where some extra caution is required, you can walk up to the crosswalk and watch the lights cycle through for the cars over and over, but you just keep getting "don't walk." After a while, you'll look behind you and see there's an extra step you need to take to get across: there's a button you need to push to get the "walk" signal you want. It's an easy thing to do, but if you don't notice it, you could stand there all day waiting.

It's Friday, and it's time to share our Top 5 articles and resources from this week's readings. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. It Pays to Give Thanks at the Office — The Wall Street Journal

In many offices, it's rare to hear "Thank you," or "I really appreciate that." But in a 2013 survey of 2,000 Americans, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, 80% of professionals agreed that receiving gratitude makes them work harder. And when researchers at the London School of Economics analyzed more than 50 studies for a 2011 paper that looked at what gets people charged up at work, they discovered some interesting findings. They concluded that we give our best effort if the work gets us interested and excited, if we feel that it’s providing meaning and purpose, and if others appreciate what we’re doing. This article digs into the details of why appreciation is such a strong motivator.

As a Talent Analyst, I am highly invested in helping others to bloom where they’re planted as well, working to maximize their natural strengths and help them grow as a result. This is fairly easy as long as the right people are planted in the right places. When they’re not, all of the nurturing in the world won’t help them thrive.

This week, it occurs to me that I’ve become the kind of person many of our clients find most challenging. You see, there’s this guy—I’ll call him Doug—who’s been reaching out to me by email, asking me to tell him who’s in charge of printed materials at The Center for Sales Strategy.

Over the past few of weeks, he’s sent me several notes, each one demonstrating another degree of persistence. Most recently, he came out very directly and said, “I going to be even more persistent than you are busy,” as if this was a war of attrition that he would eventually win. So I sent him a response, but not the one that he wanted.

I sent him a note explaining that my lack of response had less to do with how busy I am than the fact that his email did not earn a response. He found my name, and somehow, my email address. Other than that, his notes demonstrated little knowledge of my company and zero knowledge of my role in it. I wrote to him that he was asking for a referral, in a way, that he had not earned… asking me to identify the person in charge of buying printed materials for my company. (We don’t really have anyone in charge of that. We print our own.)

In his emails, he claimed that he could help, but offered little understanding of how he could help. I couldn’t tell if he was selling printers, printer ink, or printing services. So I responded to his email, but not in the way he was hoping. Instead, I explained why I wasn’t getting back to him and what he’d have to do to change that outcome. (I gave him a free coaching session on VBRs, I suppose.)

Before you click “Send” on your next introductory message, please scrutinize it with these kinds of questions:

In case you haven’t noticed, things are changing in media sales. Almost faster than we can keep up with. More and more local accounts are now being handled by the national rep. Technical dollars, those that we have little control over and are basically bought just on your ratings, are declining. There is little a local staff can do with strictly technical dollars when the salesperson doesn’t even know what the out-of-town buyer looks like, much less have a relationship with him or her.

We've come to the end of the week, and now we're sharing our favorite articles and resources from the last few days. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 5 Reasons Your Social Media Campaign Won’t Bear Fruit — Social Media Today

With over two billion people worldwide having an active presence on some social network or other, businesses now understand the importance of being on social media. But many companies are disappointed with the results they're seeing from their efforts. This post details a few reasons why companies aren’t seeing the results they’d like.

It turns out there’s something much more important.

Let’s start by acknowledging the essential nature of strategy to the success of any venture, old or new, commercial or non-profit. Strategy is the grand plan, how your solutions fit with the problems they’re intended to solve, your path to market, your role in the competitive landscape, and the relationship you seek with customers. Important? Heck, yes. We built the name of our company around that word. 

Too many sales organizations don’t have a strategy, don’t believe their strategy, don’t understand their strategy, and/or don’t follow their strategy. Their daily activities are a mish-mash of ill-fitting, often contradictory, tactics, programs, projects, and promotions—Band-Aids to cover the gaping hole where strategy is supposed to be. They create a “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get” environment that wears everyone out and leaves the organization well short of its dream, its potential, even its short-term goals, quotas, and budgets. No wonder Sun-Tzu, writing 3,000 years ago in The Art of War, called tactics without strategy “the noise before defeat.”