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Casual Articles - How To Give Your Sales Job A Strategic Tune-up
One of the best items that you can give away during a trade show is a promotional pen. They are very popular at trade shows for a good reason – when people go to trade shows, they are inundated with papers, pamphlets and flyers, most of which get tossed into a pile back at the office, never to be looked at again. However, if you had out a promotional pen with your papers or pamphlets, your pen will likely be looked at again, and again by potential clients at the trade show, even when they are back in the office.The chief reason that promotional pens are so popular at trade shows is due to their size and functionality – they are compact and something that everyone and ever
2. Where are you headed if you don't change anything
There are three basic elements of building long term profitable business relationships. What needs to be kept in mind is that the following process should be followed FOR EACH PROSPECT. This can result in some “extra work” but the payoff is well worth the additional effort. The biggest obstacle in relationship development processes that I see is they don’t get very specific with regards to individual prospects. By observing the following steps and becoming creative in the ways you apply them, you can rest assured that the outcomes will be what you want them to be for both you and your prospects.1. BEGIN AT THE ENDA. Compose a short story of what the relations
Six months down and six months to go. What will you do differently during the second half of the year to improve your selling results? If you don't take time to think about what you'll do differently, you may not do anything different. Now that’s okay if you're happy with your year to date results. If however you'd like to do more during the second half of this year you'd better think about making some changes now.
One of the keys to raising the bar is effective sales planning. For most of us selling is fun and planning is not. Remember that selling success doesn't come from doing what everyone else is doing. The most successful salespeople do the things that few salespeople take an interest in doing. There are two requirements for planning. First set aside some quiet time for creative thinking. Second, be sure to put your thoughts on paper.
At least once a year professional salespeople should dedicate a minimum of one-day to strategically think about their businesses. Don't be too quick to say you're already doing it. Most sales reps acknowledge they think about their territories and customers daily. When pressed however most will admit they don't have time to creatively think about blue sky scenarios that may happen a year from now. If you can't devote one solid day for unrestrained creative thinking, don't think about aiming for the stars. Your best bet is to wait for a shooting star to come your way.
Begin your planning process with these six critical questions. Direct these questions at your business, your territory, your accounts, your customers, and naturally your competitors. These questions will raise more questions and you should consider this process a success if you end up with more questions than answers. Here are the six questions.
1. Where are you are now? Where are you now relative to your sales results and selling skills? How's your performance? What's your relative rank within your region and within your company? What kind of overall growth do you have in your territory and in your top-10 accounts? Where are your competitors making inroads in your accounts? How well are you managing your time in your territory? What are your biggest challenges and best opportunities for growth?
2. Where are you headed if you don't change anything?
In most organizations, sales managers are the essential bridge between the company's sales goals and the realization of those goals. The gritty day-to-day interactions between the sales people and their customers are frequently filtered through the perspective of the sales manager on their way up the ladder. And the aspirations and strategies of the company's management must be imprinted by the realism of the sales manager as they come down from above. Sales managers are the conductors who carefully orchestrate the tentative entanglement of the sales people with their management.It's an incredibly important and difficult job. Unfortunately, it is often the most under-trai
At least once a year professional salespeople should dedicate a minimum of one-day to strategically think about their businesses. Don't be too quick to say you're already doing it. Most sales reps acknowledge they think about their territories and customers daily. When pressed however most will admit they don't have time to creatively think about blue sky scenarios that may happen a year from now. If you can't devote one solid day for unrestrained creative thinking, don't think about aiming for the stars. Your best bet is to wait for a shooting star to come your way.
Begin your planning process with these six critical questions. Direct these questions at your business, your territory, your accounts, your customers, and naturally your competitors. These questions will raise more questions and you should consider this process a success if you end up with more questions than answers. Here are the six questions.
1. Where are you are now? Where are you now relative to your sales results and selling skills? How's your performance? What's your relative rank within your region and within your company? What kind of overall growth do you have in your territory and in your top-10 accounts? Where are your competitors making inroads in your accounts? How well are you managing your time in your territory? What are your biggest challenges and best opportunities for growth?
2. Where are you headed if you don't change anything
Many of my clients are turning to speaking at chambers and other networking organizations to generate business. This is a wonderful method of building credibility and gaining free advertising, especially when you are in a creative business that often needs examples and samples to get people to hire you. Seminars are a great way for potential clients to "test drive" your services with out fully hiring you. Often, once a potential client sees you during a seminar, they are so impressed and convinced that you are the perfect person to hire, they can't wait to hand you a check.o Wedding Planners could do seminars for couples or brides on how to plan the perfect wedding.ple should dedicate a minimum of one-day to strategically think about their businesses. Don't be too quick to say you're already doing it. Most sales reps acknowledge they think about their territories and customers daily. When pressed however most will admit they don't have time to creatively think about blue sky scenarios that may happen a year from now. If you can't devote one solid day for unrestrained creative thinking, don't think about aiming for the stars. Your best bet is to wait for a shooting star to come your way.
Begin your planning process with these six critical questions. Direct these questions at your business, your territory, your accounts, your customers, and naturally your competitors. These questions will raise more questions and you should consider this process a success if you end up with more questions than answers. Here are the six questions.
1. Where are you are now? Where are you now relative to your sales results and selling skills? How's your performance? What's your relative rank within your region and within your company? What kind of overall growth do you have in your territory and in your top-10 accounts? Where are your competitors making inroads in your accounts? How well are you managing your time in your territory? What are your biggest challenges and best opportunities for growth?
2. Where are you headed if you don't change anything
Considering how fundamental they are to the publicist’s trade,it’s always amazed me how lousy almost all press kits truly are.Your typical press kit is a bloated folder filled with puffery,hype, irrelevant information and worse. The vast majority ofthese monstrosities do little besides kill trees and clognewsroom trash baskets. The good news is that creating a press kit that actually worksreally isn’t that hard. Let's look at the elements of a winningpress kit, and help you avoid some common pitfalls. The Psychology of a Press Kit There are two fundamental rules to creating a good press kit: 1. The press kit exists to
Begin your planning process with these six critical questions. Direct these questions at your business, your territory, your accounts, your customers, and naturally your competitors. These questions will raise more questions and you should consider this process a success if you end up with more questions than answers. Here are the six questions.
1. Where are you are now? Where are you now relative to your sales results and selling skills? How's your performance? What's your relative rank within your region and within your company? What kind of overall growth do you have in your territory and in your top-10 accounts? Where are your competitors making inroads in your accounts? How well are you managing your time in your territory? What are your biggest challenges and best opportunities for growth?
2. Where are you headed if you don't change anything
Know your customer, know your customer, know your customer. Three very important rules of business. But let me ask you this: How well do your customers know YOU?Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, asked himself this important question several decades ago. His answer: employee nametags. So, he rolled out an initiative that required all of his employees to wear badges, the purpose of which was to “help the customers get to know the people they bought from.”But helping customers “get to know you” isn’t just about names, it’s about information. In other words, it’s about self-disclosure, which is the process of revealing your personal information to another.Th
2. Where are you headed if you don't change anything? What's the implication for you if you don't acquire new skills? What happens to your overall performance next year if you don't make up the loss of your second-largest customer? How will your customers react to a strategy that is really based on a "more of the same" concept, especially when your competitors are becoming more creative in their approach? With more work and less time available, how are you planning to manage next year when your business is expected to grow 10 percent across the board? If you can't handle the sales and marketing challenges and opportunities this year, how will you respond to the one’s you face next year?
3. Where should you be headed? Do you have specific personal and professional goals? Are these goals specific and clearly defined? Are they in writing? Do you have completion dates established? For each of your top-10 accounts do you have specific objectives for sales, margins, growth rates, product mix, etc? Have you made a commitment to read sales books and to subscribe to sales publications? Have you analyzed your travel time and your time allocated to large, medium, and small accounts?
4. How will you achieve your objectives? You really can't "do" a goal or an objective. What you can and must do is create an action plan detailing how specifically you plan to achieve the goals you outlined when considering question three. For example, if your goal is to increase your sales by 12 percent in your largest account, how specifically will you do it? How many “how’s” will it take to achieve your goal? Your goals define (what you want to achieve) and your strategies define (how specifically you’ll do it.) Without proper linkage between goals and strategies, your goals begin to look like dreams.
5. What are the specific details involved? The details referred to are the who, what, where, why, when, which,
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