October 2016

A few years ago I was selling medical software to manage cases in vascular labs. I was working on a closing a $2-$3 million deal - the largest deal the company had ever seen – and I was heavy in discussions with the client. The bosses back home had made it clear this deal needed to close and soon.

 “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.”

When it comes to predicting if a business-to-business (B2B) account will cross from strong to at-risk, pay special attention to how well your corporate and customer-facing teams are performing in the area of account support.

Today’s customers expect more out of their buying experiences than ever before. These customers are also more intelligent than ever – with the explosion of available information creating a 24/7 buying and customer service mentality, and informed consumers expecting an experience that makes them feel known and valued by the companies with which they engage.

Landing a large, technical sale is like going deep-sea fishing and hooking a really big marlin. You’re straining at the rod, trying to reel the fish in, and you need help – someone to grab a net, another person to keep the sharks from grabbing a share, and someone skilled at the wheel.

Although extremely important in determining businesses’ ability to meet its revenue targets, surveys show that nearly 60 percent of sales forecasts are largely inaccurate. More troubling is that businesses might risk their stock value, reputation and well-being on forecasts derived from something slightly better than hunches.

The hard-selling closing techniques of the past may be dead, but the need to ask for commitments from the client is not. Here are some powerful tools to help you ask for commitments that lead to the close without violating your client’s trust.

Companies are struggling to train as many salespeople as they want on the skills they need, but it’s partly a product of their own doing.

Traditional salespeople need to learn that what they say doesn’t always go.