The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Most sales departments are very tactical. Managers spend most of their time on the urgent, not important tasks. Their focus is on putting out fires, rather than fire prevention. My belief is a good sales manager should strive for a 50/50 balance.

It's frustrating, isn't it! You know you can help, you know they are an ideal prospect and yet you can't even get a serious conversation started. What's going on? Salespeople are too consumed with trying to demonstrate the value of their product. It's ok to communicate some product attributes with a prospect, but the key to getting momentum is demonstrating that you can be trusted and could be a source of value.

We've been busy with summer vacations, back to school shopping, moving kids into dorms and posting adorable first day of school pictures of the munchkins on Facebook. We bet you've been busy too! That's why we wanted to send out a quick post to make sure you didn't miss some of this great content from The Center for Sales Strategy during this hectic time of year:

Too often salespeople are looking for a fast answer and end up getting a NO. You don't want a fast answer, you want a fast YES. When you ask for the business too fast, you are often relying entirely on a product pitch.

Even the best sellers have some level of call reluctance—the fear of having a conversation with a new business prospect or an existing client. Call reluctance can occur in the following situations:

The 99th Tour de France cycling race begins in just a few days. The Tour de France is arguably one of the toughest endurance contests that exists today. The quick facts: it includes 21 days of racing over a 23 day period of time, and it will cover 2100 miles with some of the most amazing uphill climbs on the planet. Twenty two teams, each with nine riders, will start the race with the plan to come out victorious. If the Tour were all about business, you could easily equate the winning of the Tour de France to that of closing a mega target account at mega key account level. So, let's look a few of the sales strategies we can take away from the Tour de France.

We live in an age that seems to encourage complexity. You can slice and dice research six ways from Sunday to build a compelling argument as to why your product or service is better than the other guys’.  Spreadsheets, pie charts and white papers are only a few keystrokes away… and illustrate why the competition is inferior to the company you represent. 

It's the official kick off to summer, which means it’s time to kick back and relax with a good book. You wanted to read about sales and marketing in your down time, right? We asked some of the staff at The Center for Sales Strategy for their top selections:

It is a safe and generally smart practice for a salesperson to under-promise and shoot to over-deliver. So why would you ever want to vary from this “under-promise” strategy? If you want to keep growing personally and discover new ways to help clients, once in a while you need to stretch a little and promise something you don’t normally deliver, but feel quite confident you can get done. There is risk involved in this, but if you get it right, you’ll delight the client and add a new capability to your tool kit.

A friend of mine was recently complaining about a computer vendor that had failed to deliver on some training that was promised as part of a major purchase. Oh, the training was conducted… it just wasn’t effective (at least, in the buyer’s opinion). For weeks after the equipment was deployed, “People were still spinning their wheels, trying to figure out the new system,” he explained.