Priority Blog
Millennials are already on the radar of many firms looking to not only boost sales in the short term, but create customers for life. But selling to millennials is not simple. In the West at least, it’s the first generation that’s grown up in the Internet era. As one insightful “selling-to-Millennials” article in the Huffington […]
Earlier, I wrote about how companies need to integrate sales and marketing. It’s completely inefficient to have these two departments that don’t talk to each other. Integrating sales and marketing isn’t a snap — and for most companies, these departments just talk past each other. If they ever did talk, this is what that a […]
I’d been working with a client as their outsourced sales management consultant for a while and we’d already achieved a 23 percent conversion rate for our inbound web leads. While nothing to sneeze at, my contracts usually involve an at risk portion for payment. I had no choice but to take on the biggest stumbling […]
Cold calling isn’t the go-to item in the sales professional’s toolbox today. That’s not good or bad – it just is. At a time when everyone seems to have (at least) one phone on hand at any given moment, it’s harder and harder to reach out to a stranger over the phone for that first […]
If you’re like me, you still get at least three sales pitches a day in your email inbox. Spam filters have forced actual sales people (as opposed to spambots, which seem to be getting blocked in my email these days – Yay!) to construct a clear and targeted message. But getting into your inbox is […]
When your company is hurting for revenue, or looking to grow fast, what kind of sales coach do you need? As a sales coach in Vancouver, I hear (and answer) this question a fair bit. If you ever played sports of any kind in school, you might have a certain perception of what a sales […]
Kelly was one of those individuals most people think has the character of a born salesperson: a winning Hollywood-quality smile; an easygoing manner that never failed to put customers at ease; always a funny anecdote in his back pocket in meetings over lunch; a superb combination of intuition, persuasiveness and product knowledge. He seemed to […]
I started doing outsourced sales management consulting and related work here in Vancouver a while back, but I still like to keep up to date with news from back in South Africa (My accent? That’s it). One headline of business news stuck out for me: “Consultants to be vetted in future” (my italics added – […]
Sales targets don’t make good sales people. Sales people make good quotas – and they do it through a constant flurry of activity that’s developed, adapted and refined over time. A methodological approach can go a long way – at least until your sales manager makes one of the most common mistakes in business: raising the […]
By the time a sales person calls a technical expert into a meeting to discuss implementation, they may have spent 6 to 16 months in qualifying the customer and getting past innumerable hurdles, from unhelpful gatekeepers to competitors trying to swoop in and steal your thunder before the contract gets signed. (Note: This article continues from What […]