Category: Sales
Upselling: The Magic Road To Profitability
Everyone upsells, it’s the best way to increase your margins. The famous, “want fries with that?” is an upsell. Super sizing is upselling. That maintenance plan on your washer and dryer is upselling. That rust coating on your car, whatever that was…was upselling. Notice how when you buy a new laptop for $600 it’s still going to cost you a […]
What A Really Good Sales Manager Does
Okay, you’re the sales manager for a 15 million dollar board shop located in the Midwest. Your sales team consists of 6 direct regional sales people and five independent sales reps; together they cover the entire U.S. and Canada. Besides managing the sales team, you also handle the company’s marketing and yes, you are also starting to dabble into social […]
What’s Wrong With Just Sticking To The Plan?
It’s amazing how much can get done when you decide to stick with it Another year another strategic plan…or worse yet another month another strategic plan. Does this sound familiar to you? Well it does to me. The most difficult thing to do when you’re a strategic consultant like I am is to make sure your clients stay focused, that […]
50 Reasons We Don’t Need Marketing And Sales
Here are some of the dumber things I have heard from people about marketing and sales: I think I’ll place one ad in a trade magazine do you think that will be worth the money? I sent out a hundred sales letters and only received ten responses and five orders. We decided to make this offering to one thousand customers […]
How Well Do Your Customers Really Know You?
As always, it’s all about the customers and more importantly, it really gets down to what your customers think about you. I want you to really think about this for a minute or two. What do your customers think about your company? What do they think about how you do business? Would they recommend you to someone else who might […]
You Gotta Keep Trying
Even after 11 tries! I read a book the other day that said that you have to make at least eleven contacts with a company before they become a customer. Eleven contacts? Wow no wonder so many people don’t make it in sales? Eleven is about eight more than most people I know, try before they get discouraged and move […]
You Have To Love Your Product
You’d better love what you sell. That’s what successful salespeople do. First, a true story about company loyalty…on steroids! My father was a very hard-working Coca Cola salesman. No matter the weather, rain, or shine, snow, sleet, hail, whatever, he was out there every day driving on the back roads of Maine, delivering his heavy cases of soda. And, he […]
On Selling Value
Let’s stop and think for a minute. What can you offer that goes way beyond the product itself? What can you offer that will get your customer thinking beyond price issues? What do you have to offer that will make your customer tremble with terror when his CPA suggests dumping you because your prices are 20% higher than anyone else’s? […]
Finding & Hiring The Right Sales Rep
Just think how much time and money you can save by choosing the right sales person for your sales force. If you take the time to do it right, if you develop and implement a hiring process that fully vets the candidate before you hire her, it will pay off exponentially. Hiring too fast is almost always disastrous. One of […]
Questions To Ask Potential Sales Reps
The problem with finding and hiring the right sales person is that, well they are sales people, they know how to sell, they know how to talk a good game, in fact so good a game that it’s hard to figure out if they are in fact really good or just great talkers! So you have to dig a little […]
