I assume you want to grow your business? Find a solution to the stalled economy?
We’ve all seen and heard the standard solution set to these challenging times: Map headcount to revenue; right size; cost containment.
This is one approach. You can make short-term gains and improve the balance sheet by playing defense and hoping your category improves. If you’d rather play offense and focus on long-term growth, sustainable advantage and bigger and better returns here is the answer:
SELL MORE!
You can sell your way back to performance and even prosperity. And that is something you can control. The competition, economy, customer expectations and the accelerated pace of change, you simply cannot.
The sale is the solution to so much of what ails many companies. New customers. More revenue. More opportunity to invest and innovate. Growth.
Sounds simple? It isn’t. Professional selling has evolved. Gone are the days of the easy order and the 20 closing techniques that really work. They don’t.
Professional selling today mandates new foundational skills and competency, elevated expertise and sophisticated business acumen that most organizations have been hard pressed to develop or acquire in the preceding 24 months. And its increasingly evident that what was good enough to get us here isn’t going to be good enough for what is next and new. Professional selling has evolved.
If you are struggling to make the Sales Shift consider if these 5 essential elements are embedded into your enterprise sales strategy:
PROCESS: Selling today requires a disciplined process founded on best practices and key performance indicators. The individual contributor should be able to map quality activity through each critical inflection point in the sales cycle. And mapping process to buying behavior is an essential element of being well positioned to the outcome objective.
URGENCY: Selling today requires driving an elevated sense of urgency into the sales cycle. If you are experiencing stalls, stops and longer cycle times it is likely you aren’t building any urgency into the decision cycle. Urgency is a function of value escalation and experiential visioning in close collaboration with the potential customer.
LEARNING: Selling today requires constant evaluation, assessment and investment to improve. When the expectation is expertise learning is a mandatory. And when you achieve expert status and are well informed then will you be appropriately positioned to add increasingly more value to a customers business.
SOLUTIONS: Would you rather be a strategic advisor or a sales rep? We all know the customer prefers a consultant and trusted advisor. Customers don’t want your stuff. They want to solve problems and accelerate opportunity. Know enough to know how to help. Partner in a way that improves their business and deliver consistently. You’ll build relationships for life.
EXPERIENCE: Sell a vision of the experience. And deliver more. The only acceptable experience is extraordinary. Here is the key: WHAT you do isn’t all that special. What you do is available from ten competitors and likely a commodity. I can probably buy it for less and find it to be quite the acceptable alternative. HOW you deliver is yours alone. Make HOW something you cannot get anywhere else. Make HOW something the customer covets and cannot live without. Differentiate and win with HOW by delivering an experience that people never forget.
If you are an executive or sales leader that wants to put your team in the best position to perform…if you are and individual contributor and want to accelerate past plan to new levels of performance and compensation…. join us this October.
We will be presenting the first PULSE Selling Open Workshop, founded on the 5 core principles outlined above. The PULSE Selling Methodology was developed through 20 years of enterprise sales application combined with innovative ideation around what will be required to sell amid this time of unprecedented transformation.
I personally believe this is the single greatest time to be in professional sales. The skills gap is widening, providing the proactive, strategic and prepared seller an abundance of opportunity to explode past the competition.
