Do You Challenge Your Sales Team To Keep it Fresh?

January 16, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

The Sales Archaeologist Blog

Frank Belzer wrote an interesting challenge in one of his older posts that I stumbled back upon in my archive for sales management. After having been in the executive search field for more than 25 years, one of the things I’m very proud of is a constantly evolving understanding of hiring top talent and sharing that with our clients. We’ve never been stuck in the same approach the vast majority of recruiters use:

  • We have a better rolodex
  • We’re experts in this field
  • We have lots of candidates in our database

That was the mantra 25 years ago and it’s tired and worn out today. Most managers and executives get weary of hearing recruiters pitch the same old story over and over.

 

History provides us with many examples of change and of methods becoming outdated. When the Greek armies conquered the world in 300BC under Alexander the Macedonian Phalanx was cutting edge technology. Five hundred years later at the battle of Cynoscephalae – it was not. The new Roman formation was more mobile and was able to outflank and crush the Greek Army.

Last week I had an opportunity to do a lot of sales training, far more than normal and it was pretty clear to me that so many times as sales professionals we revert back to old methods that although comfortable, often allow the prospects to outflank us resulting in a lack of clarity or a lost deal.

Chances are if you have been using the same methods for too long a few things have happened.

prospects are wise to your strategy – they are in control
you are just going through the motions – no passion
the method you are using is a combination of softened styles that cater to your weaknesses

Part of staying sharp and successful as a sales person involves looking for new ways to say things, new methods to reach people, new questions to ask and just continuing to grow and develop. If the Macedonians had done that at Cynoscephalae then the formation and methods that the Roman army faced would have been quite different as perhaps would have been the outcome.

 

When you interview sales candidates or sales managers, do you probe for how they keep their stories, pitches, turnarounds, handling of objections, and presentations fresh and interesting? If you look at your own sales organization, how much do you challenge that group to be fresh, have latest information, and provide a “differentiated” set of data to your clients? Or are your sales candidates still pretending like it’s 1970 and what worked then will work now?

To read Frank Belzer’s full article, click the link below:

How Fresh is Your Sales Methodology?

Barry Deutsch

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LinkedIn Offers Powerful Tools for your Sales Team

January 12, 2012 by · 1 Comment

LinkedIn for Sales

Are you training your sales professionals in how to use the advanced features of LinkedIn for marketing, introductions, and relationship building? If not, are you potentially ignoring a tool that could dramatically leverage your time and effort? If you have not gone down this path yet, what’s holding you back?

Here’s a few ideas:

  • Does everyone in your company have a LinkedIn Account?
  • Has each person input their entire contact list to check who they know is already on LinkedIn?
  • Have your sales professionals used their own contact list and that of everyone in the company to identify potential buyers at target companies who already know someone in your company – through which a warm introduction could be obtained?
  • Do your sales people use the profile manager and tagging to sort, manage, email, and nurture potential contacts?
  • Do your sales professionals all have impressive profiles fully filled out and an extensive LinkedIn Company Page?
  • Are your sales professionals using the advanced features of LinkedIn, such as blogging, presentations, video, reading lists, and others to engage with potential clients?
  • Have you brought in or hired a LinkedIn Sales Trainer to teach and train your team?
  • Have you sent your sales people to online e-courses/webinars to learn how to adapt LinkedIn to their unique selling approach?

Do you have a precise plan of how to bring your entire sales team up to speed on using LinkedIn to improve sales?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: sales management, social media · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Can Social Media Improve Your Sales Lead Generation?

February 21, 2011 by · 2 Comments

Social Media B2B Blog

Umberto Milletti, in his post on the Social Media B2B Blog, describes the value that using social media tools in the sales process can bring to improving or enhancing lead generation activities for your sales team. He describes some of the key benefits as:

  • If they are not the decision maker, identify decision makers within the prospect’s company
  • Leverage your social connections to identify a common SENIOR connection between you and the decision makers
  • Tap into social intelligence to listen to what the decision makers care about or talk about
  • Learn enough about your prospect’s current business challenges and needs to convince the common senior connection to agree to an introduction
  • Discover which other executives might be involved in the decision making process

I wrote a comment back to Umberto’s post and below is a summary of my response to how he indicates/perceives that social media can improve the sales lead generation process. I have a few major concerns – especially among entrepreneurial-to-middle market companies:

It seems that many senior executive decision makers are NOT using social media. They are not on Faceback or Twitter. They are not actively using LinkedIn. Forget for a moment senior executive decision makers. Most senior sales professionals are not using social media tools in their own sales efforts. We’re still very much in the early adopter phase for most social media practical B2B uses – outside of very young professionals and those in the tech sector.

Has this been your experience? How much are you using social media in your sales function? Are all your sales professionals trained in the latest techniques of using Umberto’s ideas to improve lead generation?

To read the full article on improving B2B lead generation, please click the link below.

Can Social Media Be Used to Improve Lead Qualification

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Is it time to take our Social Media in Sales Self-Assessment to determine if your sales team is leveraging social media and networking to the fullest potential in your company?

Filed Under: sales management, social media · Tagged: , , , ,

Are You a Resource to Your Network?

April 1, 2010 by · 4 Comments
Be a Resource to Your Network

Be a Resource to Your Network

Jason Jacobsohn, writing on his blog, Networking Insights, one of our featured feeds on the Sales Management Tab, talks about a powerful networking strategy of becoming a resource to your network. The title of his article is “Become a Resource to Grow Your Network“.

I originally wrote this blog post for our Vistage Chair Blog. After writing it, it seemed like it would also apply very easily to Members, Speakers, and Trusted Advisors – so I repost it here with a few modifications.

Jason makes the case for helping others BEFORE THEY ASK to become a focal point within your network. This is a major leap that most networkers don’t get or are unwilling to accept. If you want to be seen as someone in your network that others go out of their way to help, make referrals, work your referrals for you, and generally populate your pipeline with turned-on excited prospects, you’ve got to go above and beyond the call of duty in proactively helping others before they ask you for help.

The term I use for these people are “connectors”. They naturally put people together in their networks.

When was the last time you did this without being asked?

How often do you do it?

How do you determine if someone in your network requires help from you?

Everyone complains that their network is not giving them enough referrals for potential members. Perhaps, it’s time to step back and revisit one of the basic tenets of effective networking:

You must be a giver before a taker. You must give and give and give. I guarantee it will ultimately come back to you beyond your imagination. However, like many things in life, most give up early and don’t want to do the hard work required to turn their network into a referral machine.

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: sales management · Tagged: , , , , ,

Navigating around the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

April 1, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

Navigation around the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

In this blog post, I’ll describe how to navigate around to some of the key areas on our Vistage Leadership Community Portal Site.

We’ve already discussed in another blog posting the tabbed content of Best Practices. You can read about the tabbed structure of this site by CLICKING HERE.

At the top along the header you’ll see four links for “home”, “contact us”, “meet the experts”, and “why am I here?” These are links on our website that help you to navigate the site and provide additional information.

The home link returns you from any tab of information with blog feeds, such as the managing sales tab, back to the home page of the blog on best practices.

The contact us link provides you with a contact form to send a quick message back to us.

The Meet the Experts Page gives a short background on both Brad and I, and all our guest blogger experts.

The Why Am I Here Page provides a precise reason for reading the blog, using this site as your “portal” site for information, tools, tips, techniques, and discussion on hiring, retention, leadership, managing sales, and social media. You’ll also be able to see the more active Vistage Community Members who have established a very strong reputation for the quality of their unique content and blog frequently with great value and advice.

At the bottom of every page are 3 columns of information. First, is the Recent Posts column which lists the last 10 recent posts. Second, The featured posts column lists blog articles that we consider to be the best content posted on the blog (check back often since the posts in this column change frequently). Third, is a series of links to our LinkedIn Discussion Groups for Hiring and Retention, Vistage Chairs for leveraging social media to find great members, Vistage Members to build and enhance their business through social media, and Vistage Speakers/TAs to engage to market their services and engage with their clients more effectively.

On the sidebar (which only appears when you are on the home page/blog article listing), you’ll find a search box to locate information based on your search term. Below that you’ll find a list of blog articles that are specifically for managing your interaction with this portal, including how to navigate the site, the tabbed structure of content, and how to share information you find useful with other members of the Vistage Community.

Moving down the sidebar, you’ll see the ability to find articles listed by category, by series, and by tags (hot topics). Below that is a listing of the key blog posts for how to use this Portal site for information and learning.

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: blog information · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,