One size does not fit all in major account selling
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 18, 2016
Join me as Andy Paul and I discuss the fundamentals of major account selling in today’s market. Click here to listen to the blog on Accelerate!
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Sales Training Connection
MARCH 18, 2016
Join me as Andy Paul and I discuss the fundamentals of major account selling in today’s market. Click here to listen to the blog on Accelerate!
Sales Training Connection
SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
Salespeople dread dealing with mistakes. At best they get you off track … at worst they lose you the sale. Mistakes run the gamut from corporate issues, like defective products or billing issues, to mistakes generated by the salesperson themselves, like sharing faulty information or missing a key player involved in making the buying decision. Some mistakes are just annoying, some are financially costly, and some have even more dire consequences.
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Sales Training Connection
APRIL 12, 2017
Sales Manager. New sales managers often are promoted for their sales success – not sales management expertise. So what happens after the sales manager assumes the role and responsibilities of their new position? Too often “paperwork” like CRM systems, HR concerns, and other administrative requirements take precedence. Additionally many new sales managers are inundated by their sales team with fires to put out.
Sales Training Connection
FEBRUARY 22, 2017
Listening in sales calls. While most salespeople have come to agree that asking questions is a key skill, many still underestimate the contribution of good listening to achieving top performance. It is the forgotten twin in the proposition – ask, listen and then talk. For them, the first step is awareness. The second step is actually becoming more skilled.
Sales Training Connection
JANUARY 31, 2017
Sales performance. Constant change has always characterized the business world. Looking in the rear view mirror has never been a recommended strategy for determining future direction. However, from time to time the nature of the change takes on a different look. The scale and speed of the changes during these periods can truly be labeled disruptive.
Sales Training Connection
JANUARY 4, 2017
Crafting sales strategy. In B2B sales, one-size-does-not-fit-all is a cornerstone proposition. There are no generic customers; hence there are no winning generic strategies – each customer is unique and every winning account strategy must take that uniqueness into consideration. When thinking about what it takes to formulate a winning sales strategy , a good starting point is remembering you are dealing with a complex buying environment.
Sales Training Connection
DECEMBER 14, 2016
Selling to C-Suite Puzzle. In major accounts sales success at the C-level is a “do or die” proposition. What makes it particularly challenging is “one strike and you’re out.” There’s no second chance to get it right. Successfully selling to senior executives is a book with many chapters. However, three footnotes are particularly important: When do you sell to senior executives?
Sales Training Connection
DECEMBER 6, 2016
Negotiation Strategy. There are a substantial number of skill sets and bodies of knowledge that constitute the discipline of sales negotiation. In the end, however, the ability to craft and execute a thoughtful and creative plan for the negotiation is a bottom line for achieving a successful end result. This is particularly true in major accounts where the negotiation is complex and there is more to lose and more to gain.
Sales Training Connection
NOVEMBER 24, 2016
Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving … and for many a long weekend filled with fun, football, and perhaps some shopping.
Sales Training Connection
NOVEMBER 10, 2016
Companies spend a tremendous amount of time, money and effort every year to improve the productivity of their sales teams. The intervention strategies range from sales training efforts to coaching initiatives to sales tools to marketing materials. These efforts tend to be laser focused on helping sales reps enhance their ability to sell more effectively.
Sales Training Connection
OCTOBER 13, 2016
Sales training. Here’s the conundrum … You have a 250 person sales team. You are a new, first time Sales Training Director. You replaced a sales manager who did no sales training for a long time. To add urgency, revenue numbers have been stagnant for too long. The VP of Sales now feels that sales training is definitely needed and it needs to be done in short order.
Sales Training Connection
SEPTEMBER 20, 2016
Sales coaching puzzle. A while ago we received a call from a company wanting to talk about coaching training for their front-line sales managers. They were real cheerleaders – they believed sales managers were the pivotal job for sales success and coaching was the sales managers’ key responsibility. Since over the years we have published a lot about sales coaching and designed some very successful sales coaching training for clients, we thought we might be able to help.
Sales Training Connection
AUGUST 9, 2016
Seling with Clinical Data. Physicians – and other prescribers – report that clinical data is increasingly important in making decisions. So, as one “moves to the other side of the table,” selling with clinical is not a “nice to learn” but instead one of those “must dos.”. Sometimes clinical data is not available. But even when it is, too many salespeople do not optimize its use during interactions with medical staff.
Sales Training Connection
AUGUST 1, 2016
Sales Training – 2026. As a way of exploring the future of sales training, let’s time travel to the year 2026 and examine the major trends of the day. Suspending disbelief, assume you have time traveled and have arrived in the summer of 2026. You are journeying south on Highway 1 towards Big Sur in your Apple Titan 2.0. You have preprogramed your new Titan including a stop for lunch at Nepenthe.
Sales Training Connection
JULY 4, 2016
July 4th Fireworks. Wishing everyone a happy 4th of July holiday!
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 30, 2016
Complex Sales. When comparing small transactional sales to large complex sales, the differences in the buying process are difficult to overstate. In a complex sale the buying cycle is longer with more twists and turns; more buyers are involved both as individuals and as committees; and the competition is keene r. Everyone knows it – some because of a leap of faith and others because of experience.
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 1, 2016
Sales Training Investment. It is also not about the elapsed time since you last did it. The strategic “it” in this case is the decision about whether you should make an investment in sales training. If you traveled back in time and drop in on some of the conversations about sales training, you might hear: “We are not knocking the ball out of the park but things are okay plus we have a lot of other things going on so let’s think about that sales training thing next year” or “We just did some t
Sales Training Connection
MAY 18, 2016
Sales Training and Start-ups. Why do some start-ups make it and some don’t? As one might suspect, given the staggering number of start-ups formed every year, there is no shortage of information on critical success factors. Some common ones are: Timing, working capital, and the leadership team. In addition, the ability to develop and sustain a viable growth plan is seen as one of the more difficult and tricky success factors.
Sales Training Connection
MAY 4, 2016
Sales Training Investment. How much money are companies spending on sales training? And is it enough to worry about whether or not one is optimizing the investment? This, as they say, is the easy part. The answer to the first question is a lot; the answer to the second question is – yes. Companies spend a hefty amount of money – so yes, it is worth worrying about.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 20, 2016
Sales calls – ask questions. Today almost everyone has come around to the idea that “ asking questions ” is a critical sales skill. Asking questions is now accepted as a fundamental sales competency. Questioning is fundamental because it is used in every sales call and is required for developing advanced skills like negotiating and building customer relationships.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 13, 2016
Winning sales – connect the dots. Often a sale is lost even when the solution is a good fit because the salesperson fails to make the connection between the solution and the customer needs. The seller gets Step 1 right – they develop a good understanding of the customer’s needs. They also provide a good description of the solution so Step 2 is okay.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 23, 2016
Podcast – Sales Trends. Recently I had the pleasure of being a guest on Andy Paul’s great interview series – Accelerate! – that explores the world of sales. The topics we covered ranged from the merits of account based selling to the success factors for implementing sales models such as SPIN selling. We thought you might enjoy tuning in – Dial up the interview at.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 15, 2016
Power of Storytelling in Sales. One of the most common traps in selling is talking too soon and talking much about your product. Now, if you travel back in time there was good reason why many sales reps fall into the “product pitch” trap. They were constantly being taught the “101 tips for doing a perfect feature pitch.” They were just doing what they were taught.
Sales Training Connection
FEBRUARY 8, 2016
Melanie Whelan, CEO of SoulCycle, shared in a NY Times a simple, interesting framework for management strategy sessions. Whelan noted – we train our teams on what we call empty-bucket sessions where people state the facts of the problem, their interpretation and analysis of the facts and then and only then work collaboratively with their manager towards a solution.
Sales Training Connection
JANUARY 6, 2016
When is selling the most fun? Certainly when you have a superior product. Perhaps it’s even a “killer product”, like the Xerox copier vs. the mimeo machine. Unfortunately with global competition and advanced manufacturing technologies, those days are rare and if they do occur they are difficult to sustain. Today even when you have a superior product a competitor is likely come out with one that is just as good or better than yours in half the time of yesteryear.
Sales Training Connection
DECEMBER 2, 2015
Transition from Sales Rep to Sales Manager. Congratulations! You were a top salesperson. Now, you’re a newly appointed sales manager. The good news is you have the pivotal job for improving the sales effectiveness of your organization. The bad news – many perils and pitfalls are lurking in the shadows. Let’s take a look at 7 best practices for making the transition from sales rep to sales manager a little bit easier.
Sales Training Connection
NOVEMBER 11, 2015
Customers Buying Journey. McKinsey&Co’s David Edelman and Marc Singer recently wrote about the world of consumer buying. We thought the overall conclusion also had relevance for the B2B market. According to Edelman and Singer – “the traditional funnel model in which customers begin with a set number of brands in mind and then whittled them down until they decided what to buy—has been usurped by a customer decision journey model.
Sales Training Connection
OCTOBER 28, 2015
Whether or not you have put in place a sales process – it is happening everyday. It is whatever your salespeople are doing Monday morning to navigate the customer’s buying process. The real problem is not, therefore, a lack of sales process. The problem is too many companies do not systematically manage and evaluate their sales process. In today’ markets buyers are changing how they buy but sales organizations often fail to adjust and adapt their sales process to the new reality.
Sales Training Connection
OCTOBER 21, 2015
Sales excellence. Major account selling is truly a highly skilled and information-intense profession. Just like any highly skilled profession one must not only master skills; you must also understand the principles upon which success is built. In major account selling, the most important underlying principle is the following – sell the problem before you sell the solution – the horse must be in front of the cart.
Sales Training Connection
OCTOBER 13, 2015
Sales detective. There is little doubt that salespeople in the B2B market are finding their buyers’ journeys more complex and more subject to change than ever before. These added complications are due to factors from the disruptive trends of the time to the simple fact that more people are engaged in the buying process. If buyers change how they buy , then sellers need to change how they sell.
Sales Training Connection
AUGUST 17, 2015
Product sales pitches. If you are an avid reader of sales blogs, it’s likely you will come across three or four blogs a week about the secret sauce for creating a winning product pitch. If sales blogs had been around 25 years ago, you would have encountered even more of them because the product pitch has been around for a very long time. Way back when, companies spent an inordinate amount of time crafting product pitches for their major product offerings.
Sales Training Connection
JUNE 24, 2015
Ssales Simulation. Historically companies have often used sales simulations as a capstone sales training program for their senior sales reps or their national account group – that is when the program is positioned as a Top Gun school. While sales simulations certainly fit this need, thinking of sales simulations only as a training design for advanced programs is unnecessarily limiting.
Sales Training Connection
MAY 29, 2015
Sales reps much follow up! We’ve been interviewing several MedTech sales managers this past week. One question we posed was: What do you think are the keys to a sales rep’s success? The first answer we heard was “follow-up” We smiled … MedTech and other B2B customers we’ve surveyed over the years have universally told us that what was most important to them in a salesperson is, “do what you said you will do” – or in other words, follow-up … keep your promises.
Sales Training Connection
MAY 27, 2015
Internal Champions. In major accounts a lot of the selling is going on when you are not there. So developing internal champions is a key to sales success. When talking with sales reps about internal champions, it’s clear that in many cases once they’ve developed an internal champion, they mentally “check off the box” and move on to other things. But is one enough?
Sales Training Connection
MAY 25, 2015
Wishing all of our readers a Happy Memorial Day. Janet and Dick.
Sales Training Connection
MAY 18, 2015
Reduce risk – Sell value. Major account sales occur in a dynamic business environment with multiple players, long buying processes, and complex solutions. In this market everybody gets it. You can’t win by just pitching products; you have to sell value. Selling value is about helping the customer understand how you can help them achieve their business goals.
Sales Training Connection
MAY 4, 2015
Sales rep winners and losers. Whether in sports, politics, business or sales, this question is always on the table – What is the difference between winners and losers? Many people spend lots of time and effort trying to determine what the difference is between those people who win and those who lose. Rosabeth Moss Kanter addressed just this topic in Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Being and End.
Sales Training Connection
MAY 1, 2015
50 Sales Tips. Sales strategy tips – today’s blog takes a bit of a different twist. Earlier this week Docurated published a list of 50 Sales Strategy Tips from a variety of sales “experts”. The sales strategy tips fall into 5 categories: Building relationships and winning customers. Goal setting. Sales strategy planning. Customer retention. Sales team training and motivation.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 27, 2015
Sales Manager. How can we diagnose someone with “super salesperson syndrome”(S3)? Well, a sales manager with the “super salesperson syndrome ” will probably exhibited some of these 6 characteristics : Sell rather than coach. When push comes to shove, S 3 sales managers will spend their time selling rather than sales coaching. They’ll look for reasons why they should be engaged at various times during the sales cycle and personally make sales calls in sales reps’ accounts.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 15, 2015
'Sales Leaders. Herminia Ibaraan, an INSEAD professor, recently published a provocative book arguing that in today’s market if you desire to assume a leadership position you must get outside your comfort zone. Being stuck in outdated mindsets or ways of doing things will not lead to success. Would-be leaders must learn to pivot – it is more about doing something different rather than just the same thing better.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 13, 2015
'At dinner last night, a friend who had the good fortune of being at Woodstock relayed a story shared by Arlo Guthrie. Guthrie was at Woodstock and was asked to play a day before he was scheduled to appear. While uncomfortable with the request for a number of reasons one might guess, he went on to play at the earlier time. A couple of years later in an interview he shared that he could of and should of just should said, “No – I’m scheduled to perform tomorrow.”.
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 10, 2015
'Time Management. A new medical device salesperson emailed us last week interested in one-on-one coaching. We talked and learned that he wasn’t interested in working on sales skills, sales strategy, or even sales presentations. Fortunately, the salesperson had a sales manager who was helping in those areas. What the salesperson was interested in was: How can I do a better job managing my time?
Sales Training Connection
APRIL 8, 2015
'Sales coaching. Coaching Millennials – lately much has been written about how to get it right. What works and what doesn’t? What best practices are particularly important to keep in mind when coaching the Millennials on your sales team? This of course is all good stuff. But a Forbes article about people in their 40s and 50s recently caught our eye.
Sales Training Connection
MARCH 23, 2015
'A Classic – ’63 Corvette. As the first quarter comes to an end, it’s a good time for salespeople to take a look at their performance to date – and looking towards the end of the year. The same is true of sales managers. If you believe front-line sales managers are the key to a team’s sales success – and we do – the end of Q1 is a good time to look at what’s working, what isn’t working and why.
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