If you're a sales manager - or if you manage just about any kind of team - you may be feeling, at best, ambivalent about your regular meetings. At best they accomplish soft goals like "making sure everyone is on the same page" or "running through the numbers." At their worst - and all too frequently they are - you feel like the comic on stage tapping the microphone and asking "Is this thing on?" Let's face it: by default these meetings are often awkward and painful. Instead of fostering decision making, motivation and action, they end up being a weekly chore for you and your unlucky team members at the conference table or on the other end of the webcam or conference line.
Instead of telling yet another fragmented version of your own story, you're telling theirs. You're offering them a meaningful, thoughtful exception to or extension of their own strategy. It's a better response to being told you're not getting the business. And it's a better basis on which to pursue it in the first place. The answer to why they should buy from you can't be about you. It has to be about them.
When I conduct a sales workshop I have a verbal tic that participants notice right away. As we move through the structured materials and focused discussions of our session, I'm constantly telling them to "write this down." I do this because I'll recall an idea or strategy midstream that I know is going to prove helpful later on. So I've decided to write some of them down myself. Enjoy.
You there! Yes, you! Drop the mouse and back slowly away from the keyboard...hands where I can see 'em.
Sure, sure...I've heard it all before. You were just going about your business getting ready for…
Very few sellers do the math. Instead, they throw out meaningless generalities like "we'll help you reach more millennial moms" or "we can help make your media plan more efficient." How many more millennial moms? In what period of time? What's their economic value to my brand? How much more efficient will you help me become? How much money will I save this quarter? If I'm the customer, I may not necessarily expect you to have all the answers. But I at least want to know you asked the right questions. But isn't impossible to find these answers? If your standard is immutable truth, then perhaps. But that's not where the bar should be set. Each of us can approach our customer with a working hypothesis about the scope and cost of her unsolved problem or unrealized opportunity.
Instead of having great meetings, reps should go in with urgent, specific business problems they can help solve. They should have a specific course of action to recommend and be able to say just what that course of action would cost the customer. And they should ask very specifically for the action they want the customer to take. You may not get a hug at the elevator, but you'll start having real conversations, better forecasting, account progress and better sales.
When I conduct a sales workshop I have a verbal tic that participants notice right away. As we move through the structured materials and focused discussions of our session, I'm constantly telling them to "write this down." I do this because I'll recall an idea or strategy midstream that I know is going to prove helpful later on. So I've decided to write some of them down myself. Enjoy.
Somewhere out there this morning, a seller has already been awake for hours. She's staring at a number - her sales goal for the next several months. Her company has a solid product, not a dominant one.
Her…
Sellers who solve crimes are a rare breed in our station houses. Maybe it's because we don't call out and recognize their particular contributions enough. Or perhaps we're just not being clear about the nature of the job that needs to be done. Is the drive and ability to solve crimes just something you're born with? Or can it be taught? I aim to find out.
JP Morgan Chase publicly announced that they'd cut the number of sites on which they advertise from 400,000 to 5,000 - with no difference in marketing outcomes.
YouTube announced that its Creator program…
You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem at a time. Simplistic? Perhaps. But is there really any other way out? When I coach managers and sellers in our business I often find them feeling overwhelmed and broken by the perceived enormity of the challenges. Indeed, if you find yourself struggling intellectually with the entire issue it will, in fact, break you. But the best managers and sellers - the best executives of every stripe - all seem to have the same rhythm. They slow it down. They break it down. They solve one problem and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
If we've learned anything from the events of the past few months, it's that nothing is inconceivable.
For those of us in digital marketing and advertising, the received wisdom has been that the march of…
