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. How to Succeed in Sales as an Introvert — Salesforce

The stereotype of a sales rep is an effervescent extrovert who charms people into buying anything at any price. But if you are an introvert, take heart. You can do it, and do it just as well as your extroverted competitors. This article, written by a successful introverted salesperson, shares a few strategies and techniques to help.

There are so many areas in life where balance is important. I believe a political view too far to the right or too far to the left is not healthy, and a workout routine that is exclusively power lifting will not make you as healthy as a more diverse exercise routine.  

This is true in the sales profession as well. Great salespeople are generally hard workers and focused on the job at hand. But if you spend all your time focused on selling and not on understanding the greater business climate, you will not be as effective in your selling or as helpful to your clients.

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. 5 Effective Ways to Stop Interrupting — HubSpot

Interrupting will hurt you no matter what you do, but it’s especially detrimental in sales. Your success depends on positive interactions with prospects. You need to earn their trust and respect, as well as elicit key information from them. Here are five tips to help you.

Do you love baseball? I do. As this season winds down and teams head to the playoffs, I am already thinking of next spring and the first pitch. I always wait with anticipation to see how the team will perform every year. Will we have a winning season and make the playoffs in the fall? Do we have the right players to be a winning team?

As a sales manager and a sales consultant, I have witnessed literally thousands of sales calls with competent and hard-working salespeople—professionals who have done their homework on the prospect, prepared thought-provoking questions that make it obvious they know something about the prospect’s business, and who pose questions with a genuine interest in hearing the answers. Sometimes it is magical and they help the prospect clarify a specific problem that needs to be addressed or an opportunity on which they would really like to capitalize. And, sometimes, all they do is get their questions answered and move on. Too bad. 

What makes the difference between an interactive conversation that engages the prospect and one that is rote and turns into simply an information-gathering exercise? Follow up questions. Good follow up questions are never scripted. Good follow up questions show you were listening, that you are interested, and that you really need to learn more about the headline the prospect has just shared. Some simple open probes can reveal a lot of context and detail you need to know about a problem or opportunity—information you will probably never get if you simply move on to your next beautifully-crafted question. For example:

•  That’s interesting. Tell me why you say that.
• What do you mean by that? 
• Really? Tell me more about that.

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. 10 Things You Can Do To Increase Your Conversion Rate In The Next 10 Minutes — Sleeknote

Conversion funnels are complex. There are lots of pieces that need to be moved to create a system that consistently turns web visitors into leads and leads into customers. But opportunity lies in each element: landing pages, form fields, design, copy, etc. If you make some small tweaks to optimize these individual elements, guess what happens? They will come together to create a leaner and more efficient conversion funnel. Here are 10 key steps that will take you about 10 minutes each to implement.

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. Why You Should Be Using Your Content to Build Social Proof — Convince and Convert

Consumers have come to trust the opinions of their peers or other online experts far more than brands. Here are three tips on how you can establish valuable social proof.

Surprises are fun when they are part of a birthday; not so much when they are involved in selling. Salespeople should do their due diligence to minimize surprises during the sales process, especially when presenting and closing proposals.

Salespeople can improve their closing ratio and improve customer results using a no-surprise proposal (NSP) technique by clarifying these five things before they build and present a proposal: