When salespeople make bad deals, they have a number of ways of explaining them away. Some of them include but not limited to:
Monthly Archives: January 2014
5 Tips to Improve Sales Email Deliverability
Humans Use Pattern Recognition to deal with the Inbox
B2B business executives get a ton of bad cold email solicitations every morning in the inbox and the volume is increasing.
The Sales and Marketing Responsiveness Imperative
This article The Sales and Marketing Responsiveness Imperative was originally published on Sandhill.com on 1/27/14 and is republished in its entirety here.
With 2013 wrapped up, if I asked you how much your company spent last year to generate marketing leads, could you tell me? Could you tell me the percentage of those leads that your company followed up on?
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Is Sales Enablement a Strategic or Tactical Function?
As someone who has been a Sales Enablement “practitioner” for many years at companies both large and small, I’ve often pondered whether or not Sales Enablement is a truly strategic function.
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I is for Intent to Serve
“Life is to give, not to take”
– Victor Hugo
Let’s look a three things:
Actions
drives those actions.
behind what drives those actions.
Your actions are what are clearly visible to the external world. You act. They see.
What you experience are the consequences of those actions. Sometimes the consequences are immediate and sometimes they are not. But consequences are there for every action.
It seems like your actions play a VERY important role in how fast you will grow in your career.
What drives those actions is only partially visible.
This is a cocktail that is a mix of several ingredients that include but not limited to:
* Your ability
* Your motivation
* Your ambition
* Your values
* Your presence of mind etc
What drives the actions is more important than the actions themselves because they are the source of your actions.
Now, beneath what drives the actions is something even more important – something that’s MOSTLY invisible and private, something that drives these drivers. The core of that something is your INTENT and PHILOSOPHY. It is how you look at life and why you are doing what you are doing.
Swamy Parthasarathy, in his brilliant book on Vendanta says that the dignity of human race is founded on the principle of giving. “Be content to serve,” pleaded Christ. While giving just seems like the right thing to do, it makes sense even from a practical perspective because it hands you the insanely simple key to boosting your leverage – the power of reciprocation.
Your intent may be invisible to the other person but it is NOT something that you can hide from yourself. Good intentions such as the ones that urge you to serve first will lend you power and the not-so-good intentions will take away some power from you.
When you have the right intentions, your confidence will grow compared to when you have not-so-right intentions.
You still need to WIN the deals, as intentions alone will not get you there. What the right intentions will give you is a head start on others who have questionable ones.
Take an example that we are all familiar with – Zappos model of serving customers. If you are shopping at Zappos, you can order half-a-dozen shoes to preview at the convenience of your home. You can pick one and return the rest. Zappos will gladly pay for shipping both ways. It is a core part of the Zappos business model that has “intent to serve” at its foundation.
Think about it: Who will customers want to buy from?
While the answer is A, I am in now way suggesting that you should sacrifice everything to serve. If you don’t take care of yourself, soon your business will be history and you won’t have the capacity to serve anymore. You need to ensure that you won’t kill yourself while you are serving others. In the Zappos example, it costs a lot of money for Zappos to ship free both ways. Zappos had to ensure that the numbers work out well for the company to survive and then thrive.
In summary, you need to start with an “intent to serve” but always ensure that you continue to grow the“capacity to serve.”
Other Posts in this series
A is for Alignment (title changed on Salesforce.com blog)
B is for Bonding
C is for Confidence
D is for Detachment
E is for Excellence in Small Things
F is for Follow Up (On Huffington Post)
G is for Grateful
H is for Hunger to Succeed
I is for Intent to Serve
J is for Judgment (On Huffington Post)
K is for Knowledgeable
L is for Likeable
M is for Margin
N is for Nurturing (On Huffington Post)
O is for Onward
P is for Please
Q is for Questions (On Huffington Post)
R is for Resourcefulness (On Huffington Post)
S is for Storytelling
T is for Teaching
Topics: sales productivity
H is for Hunger to Succeed
“The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion… It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree.”
– Alexander Graham Bell
G is for Grateful
“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”
Zero Time Selling – Book Review
Zero-Time Selling by Andy Paul is a little book with a big impact and a simple but powerful message.
D is for Detachment
In general, there are a lot of people who use – “D is for Desperation” which is a recipe for a lot of stress both for the salesperson and the prospect.
For me, D is for Detachment of the outcome. In the world of sales, this may sound like nuts at first but let me explain
A B2B Selling Leader Comments on Sales Productivity in 2014
Gerhard Gschwandtner is CEO of SellingPower magazine and a B2B selling industry pundit.