Category: Sales

Sales

Introducing the “SIMPLE” Framework To Increase Your Sales Effectiveness

In the recent past, there has been a lot written about the fact that the entire buying process has undergone a sea change and due to which selling is becoming more and more difficult. I am herewith suggesting a process if when followed can still help sales teams succeed and improve their sales effectiveness dramatically.  S — Surprise: This is the first step in the process and also the most important step. In order to be able to do this, you need to understand your customers business better than they themselves know and find an insight which will surprise them. You can uncover […]

Sales

How Can Children help Sales Executives Regain Control On their Sales Process (B2B)

In the past couple of months, I have had the opportunity to interact with sales leaders in India, China, Singapore and Australia. One thing that everyone agrees is that selling, and more importantly, B2B selling is getting more and more challenging.  Buyers are getting more and more intelligent as they are able to do all the research even before inviting any sales teams in for discussion. This also means that most of the interaction tend to lean towards order fulfilment or what I call “Selling to Specs”. This is a zero sum game with no clear winners at all. The […]

Sales, Strategy

This is the Time to Re-design Your Sales Planning Process

Right now is the most important time of the year for a sales leader. Its the time when you not only are trying to support your teams to meet their annual quotas, but also supposedly need to be in the planning mode to make decisions on the sales quotas for the subsequent years. If you are like most sales leaders that I have known, you are finding it difficult to maintain a balance among both these activities. And in most cases, the closure of the year takes more precedence than planning for the next year, which would be best to […]

Marketing, Sales

How (Not) to Demo

Last week I attended a conference, where during the keynote, a cool new product was introduced and someone asked to show a demo of the product. The presenter lost the audience in two minutes flat, not due to the product not being cool, but due to the way the demo was run. I learnt the following from the demo about the art of running demos. I learnt that Talking and showing features and functions does not work anymore. Context is the key ingredient. Ensure that the demo is visible to everyone in the audience. In this case, the people sitting […]

Leadership, Sales

Three Things That I Look in a Person Before Hiring

I read a wonderful post by Shane Parrish titled “Warren Buffet: The three things I look for in a person“. Here he shares three qualities that Buffet looks in a person: Integrity Intelligence Energy He also thinks that without the first, the other two don’t matter much. This reminded me of my mentor and his principle’s while deciding to work with someone. His list was as below, in the order of importance: Integrity Passion Ambition Again, he said that without the first, the other two are a sure recipe for disaster. However, when you add that in the mix, it plays the role […]