The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Truly professional salespeople have long known that it is foolish to squander valuable needs analysis time asking questions that could have been answered by scouring the target account’s website and other conveniently available sources. Years in business, origin of the company, number of locations—and other very fundamental information—can be easily found on most client websites. Spending any meeting time on these issues—aside from kindly acknowledging the organization’s heritage—is not only a waste of time, it can be taken as an insult by the prospect. It signals that you did not find this meeting worth diligent preparation.

If you read any of the advertising trades these days you are seeing strong evidence that programmatic buying is making significant strides in the media sector. Programmatic buying allows advertisers to have direct access to the publisher’s (and now the broadcaster’s) inventory, and transactions are completed in nanoseconds with very little human interaction. In the online display advertising sector, programmatic is already accounting for nearly half of all transactions and predictions are being made that over 83% of display advertising will be bought and sold programmatically by the year 2017. Advertisers and publishers are building out trading desks to accommodate this huge flow of business.

So far, those selling traditional media have felt some degree of insulation from this wave, but that is changing as well. Last week Media Post ran an article about the rise of “programmatic TV” and this week Inside Radio featured an article on how Strata has put together a platform and an agreement that allows advertisers direct access to inventory on a number of media platforms including radio. The future is now, folks.

What a great week! There are some great gems from our writers here, and wonderful news from around the web. Read on!

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Monday, Steve Marx wrote about ways to get people to open your emails, and provided the best subject line of all time.

• Tuesday, Greg Giersch gave us a list of questions we should ask to build our personal brand, and make our LinkedIn profiles look better than they do.

It seems somehow intuitively appealing for a manager to spend more time with those salespeople who need more help. People are almost invariably amazed when we explain to them that the opposite is true. To really see ROI on your sales team, you must spend more time with your top performers.

What a great week! There are some great gems from our writers here, and wonderful news from around the web. Read on!

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Monday, Dana Bojcic confessed she'd lied to her young son, and in doing so, gave him the worst possible talent-related advice.

• Tuesday, Greg Giersch wrote exactly what I needed to read: when you're overwhelmed with how much you want to accomplish, find the very next step and work on that.

Earning that first appointment with a big prospect can be difficult. But you persevered. You were smart enough, creative enough, prepared enough, and persistent enough to nail it. He said yes. The date, time, and location are on your calendar and his. Getting this appointment was especially sweet because the guy has a reputation of being tough and demanding.

If you think the most difficult phase of the selling cycle is now behind you, I have some bad news. Now you need to measure up—to your claims and his expectations. I can’t tell you how often I see salespeople work hard and smart to get the meeting and then saunter in to his office, largely unprepared.

You “sold” the appointment.  Now you need to deliver.  Here are six things you can do to ensure that your first meeting with that big prospect goes well.  There are no second chances with prospects like this.

Have you ever started the day feeling that there was so much to do that you didn’t know where to start? If you’re in sales, it’s not uncommon to feel you have too much to sell, too many follow-up tasks, and too many deals that haven’t closed. Which activities will allow you to hit your goals?

The best advice is often the simplest. Focus on the single, next step with each client or prospect.

Focusing on just the next step is the permission you need to focus on reaching an achievable goal. And an achievable goal is motivating. We use a 7-step process in How Selling that makes it easier to decide the next step in the sales process.

What a great week! There are some great gems from our writers here, and wonderful news from around the web. Read on!

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Monday, Mike Anderson reminded us that lead generation was useless without need generation. What good are your leads if they don't need anything from you?

• Tuesday, John Henley told us to kickstart 2015 by holding a Twitter drive with your team today. What's a Twitter drive? Find out.

Going viral.

It's what a lot of people online want to do. They want a piece of their content to hit the right notes with the right people, propelling them, even for a minute, to internet fame status.

But what if you could go viral inside your key accounts?

The result would be even better than getting a million hits on a cat video. It would connect you with the people your key accounts trust and value, which would, in turn, increase the number of key accounts.

Which would increase your sales.