Sales

Surprisingly, the best price and best value is at the bottom of the customer’s priority list. See what’s at the top.

How often have we heard sayings like “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” and how often do we put that into place in our own businesses? There’s no faster killer of sales and repeat business than a poor first impression.

Have you ever seen something you wanted in a shop, tried it, checked the price online on your smartphone, found it was cheaper, and walked out? Welcome to the world of “showrooming”.

Many businesses see the task of marketing as generating leads for salespeople to follow-up. I suspect this is because people have a picture of a sales funnel or sales pipeline in their minds

Now we’re heading into the Easter Holiday season, many business owners and salespeople will get the call me back after the Bank Holiday objection, yet fail to deal with it well enough. I’m sure you’ve had people say those words or something similar to you?

This week I ran a seminar on the ways businesses can use Linked In as a sales tool to generate leads. It made me think of a situation that happened to me recently, where I was contacted over Linked In by a company that was trying to sell me some video email marketing.

Let me reflect on the folly of a business strategy that relies on undercutting your competitors to win sales.

Advertising does not have to be expensive in order to be effective. There are a number of very affordable advertising techniques that can bring you additional business without costing you a fortune.

Here I explain 7 simple ways that enable you to get ahead of your competitors in 2013. These are a few things that you can implement now to ensure that you stay ahead of your competition:

If you want a strong sales team, you need to give your new hires some TLC

Don’t let the snowy weather and prospect of lazy Friday afternoons distract you from bringing in the sales, as this could be the prime time to pick up some your best deals of the year!

The Christmas holiday period can be a frustrating time for salespeople. Buyers and decision-makers are on holiday or are busy covering for colleagues who are. Your own production, warehousing and delivery staff are off and you’re probably in the holiday mood yourself, and you may have been away as well.

To avoid that Christmas holiday hangover, follow the simple tips below and just watch the impact on your sales figures.

I recently noticed a fellow professional speaker post on his Facebook page that a potential client had told him that the fee he wanted to charge them to speak was ‘too expensive’. He went on to say he was a bit surprised, as he doesn’t normally get that kind of reaction.

With the Christmas break nearly upon us, I’m finding a lot of people asking me: “Andy, how can I use the Christmas break productively, so that I can get ahead of my competition and set myself up for a great 2013?”

On a recent trip over to the Mercedes Benz factory in Bremen, Germany to collect my new Mercedes, I noticed a number of things that would be useful sales lessons for us all to be aware of. You could improve your sales figures, and those of your team, by putting the lessons into practice!

Spend a few minutes a day on these simple activities and you can double or triple your win your sale closure rate.

The question: “how can I best incentivise my staff so I get better performance from them?” is an interesting one. Because of the wide range of businesses that I work with, the staff concerned could range from serious under-performers, through to average performers, right up to top-performers – who the managers are very happy with in terms of achieving targets, but just want more from them.

These mistakes when trying to make a sale for your business seem to be shockingly common. Make sure you’re not guilty of any of them as they could well be costing your business thousands of pounds every month.

In this blog, I explain the stupid mistakes salespeople make at exhibitions and what you need to do to make sure you don’t make the same errors.

Digital selling is changing the way sales and prospecting is done. That doesn’t mean that older, more traditional methods no longer work, more that there are new tools and platforms available to the average salesperson that weren’t there 5 years ago for example.

Are your prospects ready to buy? Eliminate the surprise factor and find out well before the close. Here’s how.

In this blog we take the example of “Peter”.

Peter attempted to sell me his company’s SEO services via email recently, and it serves as a useful example to dissect his approach, and examine the lessons you can learn from it, in order to improve your own sales approaches and increase your sales!

It’s always interesting as we head into the summer holiday period, how many people fall for the “call me back after the summer holiday” objection. For most salespeople, this starts to rear its head from the middle of July onwards.

Recently I’ve been asked by a number of small and micro business owners how best they should outsource their cold calling. Their thinking behind doing this is normally one of three reasons: They don’t want to do it themselves, they don’t have cold calling expertise within their team or they think by outsourcing it or getting someone else to do it, it gets rid of the problem!

Sandler Training is offering support to fifty 18-24 year olds that want to start career in sales