10 Ways to Become a Better Sales Person

Welcome to the New Year.


Hopefully, you have been able to keep your resolutions for 3 days so far. If one of you resolutions was to improve your sales results in 2008, Jim Klein, a sales training professional, offers the following:

Being a better salesperson is more than learning new skills and techniques. Here are my top ten ways to become a better salesperson:


1. Smile and Walk Tall
Changing your physiology is a great way to feel better about everything going around you.


I want you to try an experiment. I want you to think and act as if you are totally depressed. Come on do this with me. Stand up and act like you're totally depressed. Notice how you are standing. Your shoulders are slumped. Your head is down. Your face is sad and your breathing is shallow.


Feels pretty awful doesn't it?


Okay, Now I want you to imagine a time when you felt on top of the world, when everything was going your way, you couldn't lose. How are you standing? Your shoulders are back, head is up, your breathing is deep and you've got a big smile on your face.


Feel the difference?


2. Surround Yourself with People Who Support You
One of the most important steps you can take in your life is to build relationships with people who genuinely care about you and will support you as you go through life.


I'm talking about people who will love you during hard times and celebrate with you during the good times. People who will be painfully honest and compassionately sympathetic. People who will make you laugh and motivate you and encourage you to be that person you were meant to be.

3. Read Positive Books at Least 15 Minutes Every Day
There's a wealth of information that has been written for you to absorb. What goes in your mind is what will come out. So fill it with good, positive information and good, positive things will happen in your life.


I suggest you start your own library. Go buy a bookshelf and set a goal to fill it with books you've read. Set up an account at Amazon or Barnes and Noble and invest in your education.


The UPS truck shows up regularly at my house with deliveries from Amazon.


If you don't want to buy them, get a library card. There free!


What books should you read? Start with Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.


4. Post Your Goals and Read Them Twice a Day
Post your goals where you'll see them at different times during your day. Put them on the bathroom mirror, in your car, your office, near your computer. Write them on a 3 x 5 card and pull out the card every chance you get and read them.


Make two specific times when you take them out and read them. One is first thing in the morning before you do anything else. This will start your day focused on your goals and their achievement.


The second is right before you go to bed. This practice will give your subconscious mind something positive to work on during the night.


5. Be Grateful For The Little Things
Find time every day to be grateful for all you have. We all have something we can be grateful for. Some of these are little things that we take for granted like our health, our home, our friends, the food in the refrigerator. Focusing on what you're grateful for will bring more of it in to your life.


I'm grateful every day when I wake up and my feet hit the floor.


6. Spend Time Doing What Matter Most
We waste too much time on things that bring little enjoyment into our lives. It's time to spend our time doing the things that matter most.


Have dinner with your family. Attend your child's play or baseball game. Help an elderly person cross the street. Take a walk and enjoy the view.


Some things are more important than money, status, power and prestige. Invest some of your time into those activities and see if it doesn't change the way you feel.


7. Treat Stumbling Blocks as Stepping Stones
So what if you didn't make that big sale, your girlfriend left you, your boss chewed you out or you made a big mistake?


Your life isn't over. So keep your eyes on your goals.


What did you do right? What did you learn? How can you use this to make yourself better or stronger? What will you do different the next time?


Use it as a stepping stone to take you to the next level.


I've had some of my biggest periods of growth after major setbacks.


8. Help others to succeed
When you're gone, nobody will be talking about how much money you made or how many awards you won, they will be talking about the lives you touched and the difference you made.


Success is so sweet when you can share your knowledge and caring with others. Give of yourself. It will make the people you touch feel good and I know how it will make you feel.


The sad part is when people come to the end of their lives and think about all the things they wish they'd done.


9. Reward yourself
When you sell that big account or reach a goal you set, reward yourself. Go buy something you've always wanted, take a trip, go out for an expensive dinner. Do something nice for you. You deserve it.


10. Tomorrow is a New Day
No matter what happened today, good or bad. You can go to sleep tonight knowing that tomorrow the slate is wiped clean. You get a fresh new 24 hours to accomplish any thing you want.

Article Source: ArticleYard

Can You Predict Quota Attainment with Sales-populated Analytics?

Experienced executives know that the difference between success and failure rests squarely on the quality of the people representing the company. Even if you have a superior product and strong sales processes, if your sales team is not engaged or lacks confidence (in themselves, in the product, or in the company), achieving your goals will be an uphill battle. It becomes even more complicated and challenging if you employ a multi-channel sales strategy to reach your revenue objectives.

Confident sales teams, on the other hand, are not only motivated to win, but will find new ways to make your company a success. Primary Intelligence’s Sales Confidence Index (SCI) provides your organization with crucial information about your sales channels’ level of confidence, providing you with best practices that you can use to improve performance, and identifying the root causes for why your team isn’t as confident or engaged as they should be.

Many companies have strong marketing research or PR programs in place to help gauge how they and their solutions are seen by prospective customers. However, many of these companies neglect to analyze the other side of the relationship: how they are seen by the people representing the business. By maintaining an external focus, these companies are ignoring an important truth:

If your sales team has doubts, your customers will as well.

In fact, there is a direct correlation between the confidence of your sales team and your sales performance. If your sales confidence drops, and nothing is done to correct the situation, within three to six months your organization’s win ratio will suffer as a result. On the other hand, a jump in your sales confidence will create measurable results in a matter of quarters. This makes sales confidence a powerful leading indicator of your company’s success.


To get an accurate measurement of your sales team’s confidence, you must examine four basic drivers: your team’s confidence in themselves, their confidence in the company, their confidence in the product, and their confidence in their ability to compete with the competition. Using a concise, confidential online interview, Primary Intelligence measures the key influencers of your sales team’s confidence in the areas of knowledge, passion, and performance.

The SCI tool then presents the findings to you through customizable, easy to understand metrics that let you track how the most important drivers of confidence are trending over time. The information that SCI provides will allow you and your sales executives to learn:

What sales initiatives are helping your sales force the most?

What resources does your sales team need to be more effective?

What does your sales force see as the largest obstacles preventing their success?

Which competitors pose the biggest threat?

How are your products perceived and presented by your channel partners?

What improvements in your products and services would your sales channels like to see?

Scores from Primary Intelligence's proprietary tools demonstrate in a very readable fashion where the sales team is headed, collectively and in individual units.

For more information, let's chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Use Competitive Intelligence to Determine Positioning in Sales and Marketing

In a standard win loss project, one of the exercises we at Primary Intelligence perform during the interview process is to allow the respondent (a recent decision-maker that evaluated our client) rank the top three company, product and sales performance areas. The result is often a chart that looks like the one below:

Quickly, our client was able to see how to rework the sales message to be more effective. They changed their talk from customization and implementation to technology, functionality and integration. They used those topics to build the value proposition and outmaneuver the competition on cost.

It should be noted that, in this case, our client was one of the higher-end vendors. If they addressed price in the first sentence, they rarely made it to value.

Interestingly, Technology was rarely rated as the #1 criteria, but it was the second most mentioned criteria in the list overall.

Do you have this kind of visibility into your sales and marketing messages? If not, let’s do a couple of post-sales analyses free for you. Give me a call and let’s set something up. (Chris, 801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

You Got a Check. Did You Really Win?

In last week’s post, I gave an example of a company that won a deal, but learned something very important about its pricing structure.

Below, I’m going to share a little more about the deal. After reviewing this information, tell me if you think this company is winning business or not.

“They don’t demonstrate their products. I have never met a representative from FlashNet* in person, and that has a lot to do with my rating. They have never shown up. They are definitely not getting the share of business that they could get because of it. I can guarantee it. “I’ll give you an example: we bought a 20 TB storage area network. 10 TB is currently installed, and were looking at upgrading it. They’re in the storage networking business, so they wouldn’t come see us; they were not even in the list of potential vendors because of that reason. It’s that simple.

“Lunch meetings do make business. They have never visited us. I’ll give you an example: I probably spend about $1 million to $2 million in Cisco equipment a year. Last year, I only spent about $60,000 with FlashNet; this year, I probably spent about $200,000 with them. For the last four years, they have only had a small portion of my overall Cisco business, and when you look at it from an enterprise perspective—for example, we just spent $20 million on a new clinical information system—out of $20 million, FlashNet received no money from that project. We have a budget of $30 million, and FlashNet received just $60,000 of that. It’s because they will not fly anybody out here.

“They don’t have a presence out here, and that’s unfortunate for them. They are a good vendor; it’s unfortunate that they will not come out to meet their customers.”

*Name changed to maintain confidentiality

The fact of the matter is that FlashNet got a check and sold some stuff, but they received less than 1% of the total budget and 0% of a project where they had a potentially strong solution. FlashNet is probably getting a little money just because it is an incumbent in some part of the client's business.

This is probably not a unique case. How many times is FlashNet losing because of a short-sighted decision not to travel and visit? There may be logistical reasons, but this client is located in a suburb of Portland, Oregon; hardly the backwaters of the B2B sales world. Last I checked, Portland has an airport and rental car services.

Do you think that FlashNet will make any changes to its processes based on the information above? I hope so. I hope this information goes to the executive level rather than being shelved with all of the other dusty reports. I’ll probably never know. But, if I were an exec, this is the kind of intelligence I would need.

I would stop high-fiving the sales guy for winning $60K and start asking questions about why we’re not taking $5M.

If you feel differently, or if I’m missing something, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

And, if you want this type of intelligence on your new customers and lost prospects, Primary Intelligence does this kind of stuff every day.