Inside Sales
Virtual Selling – Your Motive Is Ultimately Transparent
Here’s a disruptive truth for you: the receptivity of your audience has more impact on your success than the power of your message. Think about planting. A seed that lands on concrete doesn’t germinate. If the soil isn’t fertile, the quality of the seed just doesn’t matter. Creating fertile soil always precedes planting. During the…
Read MoreThe 3 “F”s of Strategic Sales Call Planning
There are a ton of “sales strategies” or “winning strategies” – but here’s the problem: most sellers only focus on one, or over-focus on one, completely ignoring the others. When you’re talking to a prospect and they express some interest in your offering, there are different ways (strategies) to approach advancing the sale. We’ll…
Read MoreVirtual Prospecting: Using the ADAPT Response to Counter Prospect Brushoffs
Cold calling, and prospecting in general, is a great challenge for most sales reps, across industries and at all levels of experience. Over the many years we’ve worked with sales professionals, we’ve managed to formulate several ways to make reaching out to prospects a more seamless and successful undertaking for those who sell for a…
Read More2 Simple Steps for Handling Customer Objections
Can you hear me now? You must remember that ad from a few years ago. Well, I recently upgraded to a new cell phone. It took two trips to the store and two different sales people. When the first salesperson attempted to close with, “Is that the one you think you’d like?” I wasn’t…
Read MoreMake Cold Calling Great Again (with the 10-30-3 Framework)
Cold calling. Perhaps the most dreaded aspect of an inside sales reps’ duties. And with COVID-19 keeping us all in WFH mode, most salespeople have essentially taken on that role. But cold calling doesn’t have to be what it’s reputation has made it. We spend a lot of time nowadays beating the email drum. And…
Read MoreVirtual Selling: Are You Spending Your Question Allowance Wisely?
White chocolate. It was my favorite sweet treat as a kid… and it still is. In the summer I usually managed my meager allowance pretty well (even saving a little) and would look forward to going to the drug store down the street and indulging myself in pure delight once or twice a week. But…
Read MoreProspect Your Way to Selling Success – Step 4: Remove Tension
Steps one, two and three focused on navigating the obvious barriers to getting more meetings with decision makers. This next step is about addressing perhaps the most ominous challenge – one that’s never verbally communicated but is always present. Step Four: Remove the Tension In almost every interaction between seller and prospect, a certain tension…
Read MoreProspect Your Way to Selling Success – Step 3: 3-Minute Meeting
If you’ve been following me on this step-by-step approach to filling your pipeline, you already know how to capture the prospect’s attention and the best answer to the question: “Why meet?” Next, we need to move this total stranger from “this looks interesting” to giving up their most precious resource: time. The best way to…
Read MoreProspect Your Way to Selling Success – Step 2: “Why Meet?”
If you understand and implement the principles offered in Step One, you will get the prospect’s attention. As the suit guy says, “I guarantee it.” Like unexpectedly jumping out from behind a door, there are some predictable things you can do to control eyeballs when facing obstacles to prospecting. The next step is a bit…
Read MoreProspecting in Sales Requires Relationship Building. Does Your Team Know How?
Managing a sales team has its own unique set of challenges when it comes to selling and building customer relationships — especially when prospecting over the phone. Even the most well-meaning sales reps might be unsuccessful when encountering certain obstacles in the prospecting process. So, how do you handle the challenges that arise when prospecting…
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