The Sales Expeditor

Are you at ease when you must dig in and have a difficult conversation with a prospect about finances?  Whether they have the money, where it could come from, how they would get it, how much they could get, what it would take, who they must speak with, what they could reprioritize, and a host of other money related topics? The table below shows the percentage of salespeople with strengths in a range of competencies based on whether they Comfortable Talking about Money or it's a weakness. As you can see, salespeople who are comfortable talking about money are much stronger in other competencies than salespeople who are not comfortable talking about money. The percentage(s) show how much stronger they are in that area.

Urgency is an innate, emotional need to get something done now. It cannot be taught but events can influence it. Let say it’s April 14th and you haven’t done your taxes. A public service announcement plays on the radio, talking about the consequences of not filing. Your gut aches. The ache is your conscious triggers fear which hopefully results in action.

Like many characters in Game of Thrones, Arya's journey has transformed her. Recently, during the battle of Winterfell, she repeats a phrase she learned from her sword-fighting teachers about death. Not today! This perfectly summarizes how important attitude and mindset are in all things, particularly sales. 

The time difference between first and tenth place in the 2018 Tour de France was 14 minutes. That sounds like a lot until you realize that the course is 2,200 miles!  This is a .0028% difference. Greg LeMond won the 1989 tour by eight seconds. In this video I discuss data from Objective Management Group which proves that what sales leaders spend their time on correlates directly with revenue.

CSO Insights' 2018-2019 sales performance study shows that only 47.3% of forecast business closes. Imagine what would happen if the KPI's in other departments looked like this. In this short video I discuss one of the primary reasons this happens and how to fix it. 

Every CEO, President, GM or sales leader I speak to complains about delayed closing and inaccurate forecasts. This video post discusses why your sales pipeline may be a black hole. Opportunities are entered never to be seen again. Objective Management Groups data warehouse provides deep insight into solving this fundamental problem.

Closing percentage can mean a lot of different things, including how much time you might waste from the point at which an opportunity becomes closable until it is actually closed. Let's say you close 30% of your proposals to new and existing customers. When you consider the 70% that you did not close, approximately how much time do you think you wasted? Is it 20%, 30% or higher? We know it's  not zero. One primary driver of this is our ability to achieve great clarity with our questions. In today's video I discuss the analogy of using bright lines and fine lines. This two-minute clip will help you improve your questioning process.  

Todays video blog discusses some of the things which prevent sales leaders from having maximum impact on their sales force. In the Pogo cartoon script, the phrase "We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us" teases the problem.   Are too few of your salespeople missing quota or nor finding enough new business? Learn some time proven strategies to make your salespeople better. Attend our sales leadership Intensive and close your gaps!

Since September, I have conducted eight multi-day sales intensives for about three hundred salespeople. The vast majority of attendees had 5-25 years of tenure. When shown the graphic below virtually all agree they regularly skip steps between first and second base and run to third.

A significant percentage of the annual revenue for gyms occurs in January. By late February or March, you can stroll into most health club without lines and work out without interruption.