Experts

Art Sobczak, author of Smart Calling, distinguishes in our interview between rejection, which is created by stupid selling mistakes, and resistance, which is natural for any buyer and easy for any skilled sales pro to get past. Art is a great teacher on how to avoid making stupid mistakes. He also shares a masterful process for getting through resistance.

Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling, helps us become a welcome sight to overwhelmed customers. She gets to the heart of dealing with the biggest customer shifts since the recession: they are risk averse, overwhelmingly busy, and bombarded with information-overload.

Ben Zoldan, co-author of What Great Salespeople Do, shows us how to craft a story that not only helps prospects feel like they know us well, but also gets them to reciprocate with their own personal story. Powerpoint is not invited to this party.

Andy Rudin, leader of Outside Technologies, reveals what risks can hamper your success and how to design a process to mitigate them. He provides a really smart list of strategic questions to qualify while you are uncovering risk and drawing the prospect in at the same time.

Sam Richter, author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, is a master at using the internet for sales research. He shows us how to answer, “Tell me about your business” on-line rather than take up precious time with your prospects. Our greatest take-away from this interview is how to go from surfing (a waste of time) to searching (ultra-productive) on the internet.

Eliminate Resistance

Preparing to overcome objections is a crucial part of our jobs. Uncovering personal agendas and turning concerns into buying interest is a skill we can make better. And how about skipping what creates resistance all together? We interviewed an expert who has ingenious advice for doing just that.

Kevin Allen, author of The Hidden Agenda knows a secret. He has figured out how to discover the personal motives and concerns of every decision maker and build his solution to them into his value pitch. Kevin shares how to get beyond pitching functional value and speak to the hidden agenda that really moves our prospects to take action.

Joanne Black, author of No More Cold Calling, discovered while doing research for a client, that the fastest closing, highest quality leads come from referrals. And sellers rarely ask for them. She shares how to design a Referral Selling system that gets us beyond our discomfort of asking for referrals makes our customers feel great about giving them.

Craft High Value Offers

Offer dramatically greater value than the price to get it and your customer has an offer that is too good to refuse. Just how do you design such an offer? In addition to interviews with Jill Konrath, Kevin Allen, and Jack Malcolm who share their best advice on this topic, these experts have surprising approaches to create our opportunities with superior value design:

Phil Styrlund, creator of Third Box Selling, shows us how to create demand for a solution that our customers didn’t think to shop for, yet desperately want and value. This rewrites the competitive standard, and his examples with Walmart and McDonald’s make me believe there is no such thing as a commodity anymore.

Kevin McArdle, creator of High Value Selling, shares how to master the diagnosis that goes into building a bigger business case for value. He also shares his secret of how to get customers committed to take action.

Motivate Prospects to Buy

Sales psychology is alive and growing. Like it or not, we need to understand how to build it into our sales skill set. To get prospects to decide 'I have to get this now' instead of just thinking about buying from us, we need to keep getting better at these powerful levers.

Our expert interviews on this topic are just wrapping up and will be announced shortly.

Optimize My Work

We have 215 work days in a year. How can we make the most of each one. Our experts share their favorite technology, work hacks, and productivity secrets to make the most of every day.

Nancy Nardin, creator of Smart Selling Tools, shows us how to create demand for a solution that our customers didn’t think to shop for, yet desperately want and value. This rewrites the competitive standard, and his examples with Walmart and McDonald’s make me believe there is no such thing as a commodity anymore.

Jonathan London, author of Using Technology to Sell, shares the do's and don'ts of using technology to be more effective and shares his favorite apps to save time and wow customers through the sales process.

Diane Helbig, author of Lemonade Stand Selling, helps us overcome our realities of distraction and get clarity so we can seize this day and make the most of it.

Ken Thoreson, author of Leading High Performance Sales Teams, takes us through his template to create a personal business plan to keep us on track toward our quota and goals. He offers an accountability approach that gets sales reps helping each other instead of just competing.

Accelerate My Sales Process

The holy grail of success is figuring out how to have a bigger, faster sales pipeline. The sales tips offered in these interviews are worth their weight in gold. Get better at predicting close rates, compress the sales steps, enter a deal at just the right time – if I had to get fast improvement, this is the topic I would start getting better at now.

Craig Elias, author of Shift! Harness the Trigger Events that Turn Prospects into Customers, reveals a genius way to show up at exactly the time a prospect is ready to make a change. With perfect timing, we eliminate the competition and most objections in the sales process. And it is so easy to figure out the right timing with what Craig teaches us.

Dave Kurlan, author of Baseline Selling, gives us a compelling reason to become more skeptical in our sales work – we will sell more and faster as a result. Dave helps us identify how to get speed through our sales process and transform our attitude in the process.

Dave Brock, leader of Partners in Excellence, helps us eliminate everything that slows down our sales process, and add a few smart things back into our work. He leads by example by sharing his own prospecting process and how he has messed it up. Then he makes sure we not only know how to stay on track, but shares an amazing example of how to compress the sales process into fewer calls to take a year or more out of our sales cycle.