Depending on the selling approach you’re using, you are closing between .6% – 7% , regardless of size of solution or industry.
These numbers are far lower than they need to be: so long as your primary focus is on making a sale and you focus on needs assessment and solution choice (factors which are the buyer’s final considerations), and ignore the [...]

Sales folks are taught to have a certain amount of curiosity. But what, exactly, are you curious about?
You have been taught to be curious about needs. Do prospects need your solution? Are they in ‘pain’? The moment — the very moment — you hear that a ‘need’ matches your solution, you’re off and running. And you (wrongly) [...]

As a seller, what’s your job?  Are you working to close a sale?

A recent client is an international B2B company with a very non-optimal – but not unusual – way of compensating their sales folks.
They split the sales team into an Inside Sales group that makes appointments, and Corporate and Field Sales teams to close them. The structure, as well as the compensation, promotes failure: Inside Sales is paid per appointment (with a tendency to [...]

In order for any change to occur – whether it’s a decision to purchase a product, or an implementation to add new technology - whatever touches the ultimate solution must buy-in to the change.
Often our focus is on getting the end-result we think we want. We forget that without buy-in from the necessary  people and policies that maintain the status quo, we face the [...]

What criteria do you use to compensate your sales folks? Some combination of salary, commission, and year-end bonus, based on industry standard? And how do you know that that is the appropriate standard?
I believe we are currently paying our sales folks to waste 90% of their time. They are spending time  pushing solution information to the wrong people at the wrong time, and have no idea [...]