Cleveland Sales Talk

Here are 10 tips to help with improving your sales performance. Great stuff!!

Labels: Performance, Sales, Self-Development

Recently I had been spending some time reading, well, actually listening to Jim Collins and two of his books, Good To Great and then Great by Choice. They are amazing looks at business and led me to believe that truly successful companies are surrounded by great individuals.

At my Toastmasters club, Towpath Talkers, I did a speech on one of the the concepts in Good to Great, the Hedgehog Concept, called "Good is the Enemy of Great". The concept is about taking three distinct areas to focus on and finding the sweet spot at the intersection of all three. The three core competencies are 1) be passionate about what you do, 2) find your key economic indicator and 3) find out what your company is best at in the world. You have to have all three to become great. You can get all of this and more in his books and I have links below for each.

What made me think about this once again was the article, Newbie leadership mistakes and the important lessons learned, on Smartblog for Leadership. The 8 specific tips are by promising young entrepreneurs. Read this great article here.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

Labels: Business, Good To Great, Hedgehog Concept, leadership, management, Sales

Customer first!! How many times do you hear that in the business world? What does it mean to you? If you are not careful you can alienate customers and then of course, lose those customers. Without customers you can just close your doors. So, customer first needs to be top of mind throughout your organization. Here is an article that elaborates a bit more on some key components of putting the customer first.

Read it here.

Labels: Business, Customers

This is a great article addressing gaining customer loyalty.

Read it at the Ryan Estis blog here.

Author provides 8 reasons you might be losing sales. I recently did a presentation on an IFDA/Technomic study about operator perspectives on sales people and some of the reasons in this article resonate loudly.

Read the entire article:
SalesDog.com | Free Resources for Sales Professionals

This article does a great job of identifying three skills needed in the B2B selling world. We need to train to these skill sets.

1. The first skill is understanding and leveraging politics and influence within your customer accounts.

2. A second advanced selling capability is business and financial acumen.

3. The third selling capability is deployment of military-like competitive selling strategies and tactics.

Read the entire article here:
Higher Education | SalesAndMarketing.com

You have to be able to ask effective, thought-provoking and open-ended questions to engage your prospect.

Questions to Qualify Prospects | Sales Management Digest 2012-12-11 | SellingPower

Here is a very good article from Jill Konrath.

I was inspired by what he was doing. I want to bring ‘Eastwooding’ into the sales field. In fact, I’d recommend that all sellers do it before they:

Read the entire article here.

Ever wonder what to focus on? Here is a great article that sets you up to focus on just three important yet simple disciplines. Sometimes you can lose sight of the top priorities and spend more time on what I consider non-strategic tasks. There are times when you just have to stop with the task-rich job functions and focus on where you can truly move the needle. Enjoy!

http://www.salesgravy.com/sales-articles/career-management-and-advancement/the-top-priorities-of-a-disciplined-sales-manager.html