Partners in Excellence

MARCH 27, 2019

If the customer can’t identify, independently or with our help, the consequences of not changing, not taking action, not moving forward, they have no need to buy! We still have a need to sell, and, too often, we continue to pester the customer in our efforts to sell them.

Margin 93

Margin Retention Sales Cycle Up-Sell 93

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 16, 2019

I read a post about influencing and accelerating our customers’ buying decisions. The author thought trying to acclerate or “move in” the buying decision was wrong. I don’t disagree–usually, our motives for trying to do this is getting an order and making out numbers.

Discount 80

Discount Incentives Incentive ACT 80

Partners in Excellence

MAY 27, 2020

But these reviews seldom address the most important issues we need to understand in managing our pipelines: Do we have a high quality/high integrity pipeline? Do we have sufficient volume and velocity in the pipeline to achieve our goals? We want to address the single issue, are we doing enough to achieve our goals.

Pipeline 101

Pipeline Buying Cycle Face-to-face Sales Cycle 101

BuzzBoard

FEBRUARY 5, 2024

Today, with the help of this transformative technology, sellers are able to have more productive sales cycles, faster deals, and stronger long-term customer relationships within the SMB segment. Read our detailed perspective. With GenAI or generative AI, this entire process accelerates.

Competition 52

Competition Scale Social Media Trends 52

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 23, 2019

This team has been using our Sales Execution Framework (SEF) as the cornerstone to their sales execution strategy. Since we had improved performance in so many areas, we were looking at the issue, “Can we compress the sales cycle?” They are led by a great manager who has built a talented team.

Sales Cycle 100

Sales Cycle Discount Coaching Forecasting 100

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 26, 2022

Our focus, in qualifying, is mostly on us. In focusing on our interestToo often, we think, because the customer is meeting with us, because they don’t disagree, they must be qualified. Qualification is not an event, it is an ongoing process. Qualifying is the process of committing to a change initiative.

Ideal Customer Profile 68

Ideal Customer Profile BANT Pipeline Margin 68

Janek Performance Group

APRIL 5, 2023

Profits, People, and Process “You cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather…but you can when it’s raining.” The sales team must go on the offensive and consistently beat the competition at winning the best customers. The slowdown effect will be unique to each company’s sales process.

Sales Leadership 62

Sales Leadership Top of Funnel Sales Talent Inbound 62

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

We spend lots of time and money trying to create predictable revenue, increasing the predictability of our sales approaches. We constantly engineer, refine, tune and re-engineer what we do and how we engage our customers to produce POs. And virtually every survey shows how little too many customers value sales interactions.

Engineering 87

Engineering Survey Revenue Customer 87

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 18, 2019

The world, both our customers and our own, is best characterized by turbulence. Too often, our customers are struggling to cope, to keep up, to understand, often to survive. In the face of all of this, how can we create the greatest value with our customers, how can we be most helpful?

Face-to-face 87

Face-to-face Sales Talent Enterprise Enterprise 87

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 23, 2018

It may not be obvious, but strong project management skills are essential for top performing sales people—both for helping our customers buy and for effectively leveraging our own resources in the process. Our customers have a project–not a buying journey. Think about it, a moment.

Sales 93

Sales Tools Objections Meeting 93

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 9, 2019

Over time, the value proposition became a financially justified business proposal, demonstrating the specific improvements the customer should expect from our solutions. Some versions would look at quality, productivity, the experience our customer could create for their customer and so on.

Face-to-face 87

Face-to-face Proposal Engineering Enterprise 87

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 2, 2012

In reality it seems things drag on and on and on and… We blame the customer, they aren’t moving forward. Some sales calls where we are exchanging information with the customer–what they want, what we have, question, answer, ping, pong…… I ask, “What happened in the call?

Call-back 86

Call-back Forecasting Buying Cycle Sales Process 86

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 14, 2017

It seems getting things done is just harder–not just the volume of things we have to get done, but the process of it. Working with our customers is much more complex—more people involved in the Decisionmaking Process. Because we have complex solutions, we have more people involved in the selling process.

Face-to-face 74

Face-to-face B2C Up-Sell Sales Cycle 74

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 30, 2013

I hear it all the time, “I need an excuse to get back into the customer. ” Creating excuses to get back into the customer is nothing but old sales mythology. It does nothing to serve us or the customer. We’re all desperate to find customers willing to talk to us, willing to consider buying.

Customer 86

Customer Call-back Case Study Sales Cycle 86

Anthony Iannarino

APRIL 21, 2019

We don’t spend enough time with our dream clients to effectively serve them. As markets are pulled in two directions , super-transactional or super-relational, the transactional approach of reducing friction, compressing the sales cycle, and eliminating as much real communication as possible is seductive. No more pushy sales tactics.

Workbooks 84

Workbooks Lead Rank Face-to-face Fashion 84

Partners in Excellence

MAY 29, 2022

All of these are foundational in engaging our customers to think differently. They are critical as we look at our own strategies and performance. So here goes: Typically, when we have an unhealthy pipeline, we don’t have enough opportunities to achieve our numbers. But too often, we fail to do this.

Pipeline 75

Pipeline Analysis Sales Cycle Opportunity 75

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

Too often, we inundate our people with all sorts of things they must do to achieve their goals. Failing to do all of them impacts our ability to perform. It is in our targeted accounts or our territory (however that might be found), we find and qualify the opportunities we want to chase.

Jigsaw 68

Jigsaw Top of Funnel Territories Maximizer 68

SBI

DECEMBER 27, 2018

All stars are the result of a balance of forces: the force of gravity compresses atoms in interstellar gas until the fusion reactions begin. The state of the B2B buying experience is rife with dissatisfaction over seller’s engagement strategies. The ROI of our solution is somewhat industry specific. Top 5 guest posts 2018.

SAP 94

SAP Trade Show ROI Margin 94

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 27, 2013

So it is important that we are as accurate as possible in developing our Sales Forecasts. Sales Forecasting Will Never Be 100% Accurate Or Completely Deterministic: Because we are dependent on a customer decision, we will never be 100% accurate in our sales forecast. We are just guessing. As a manager, this worries me.

Sales Forecasts 94

Sales Forecasts Forecasting Top of Funnel Buying Cycle 94

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 19, 2012

A strong sales process is critical to our effectiveness as sales professionals. Without a strong process, it’s comparable to an aimless walk—we may reach our destination, but then again we may not. Or we may reach our destination after an overly long journey. Buying is very complex.

Sales Process 92

Sales Process Maximizer Lead Rank Lead Scoring 92

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 20, 2019

I wrote, “Tilting The Numbers In Our Favor, The Tyranny Of More.” ” In that, I suggested we might actually be more effective if we started thinking about how we accomplish our goals by doing less. The basic premise is that to do less and still achieve our goals, we have to do much better.

Penetration 82

Penetration Lead Rank Maximizer Sales Qualified Lead 82

Partners in Excellence

JULY 29, 2012

The topic of conversation was, “How do we create excuses to keep coming back to the customer? This mentality still exists with too many sales people, “What excuse do I have to get back to see a customer?” Creating excuses to get back in to see the customer doesn’t create value. It also wastes our time!

Customer 86

Customer Call-back Collateral Case Study 86

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 12, 2012

The sales process is the cornerstone to driving the highest levels of sales performance. There’s so much data supporting this, one would think discussing sales process should be a non issue—-every organization should continually be strengthening their process, sales people should be executing them with precision.

Sales Process 91

Sales Process Maximizer Discount Sales Cycle 91

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 13, 2014

We qualify a customer, we understand their buying process, we align our activities to complement their buying process, we set a Target Close Date in our CRM system. Our customer slows down, maybe they are diverted, maybe it’s just taking them longer than they anticipate, the deal slips again.

Forecasting 90

Forecasting Decision Maker Pipeline CRM 90

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 8, 2015

We spend a lot of time seeking to increase pipeline velocity, compressing sales cycles, and focusing on sales velocity. Sometimes in moving faster, we pass our customer and where they are in their own buying journey. This is where so much of our problem with getting customers buy comes in.

Top of Funnel 48

Top of Funnel Government Funnel Pipeline 48

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 12, 2014

From a sales person’s point of view, the fundamental cause/effect determinant is the sales process. It’s the understanding that if we execute these things, aligned with the customer executing their buying activities, we produce these results. Are we chasing the wrong customers and wrong deals?

Coaching 96

Coaching Meeting Sales Cycle Quota 96

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 21, 2017

They are struggling to make their numbers, they face more competition, it’s more challenging to access customers, things seem to be tougher. It’s understanding how to find and qualify the right customers. We do this at scale by looking at the common patterns across our business. Who are the right customers?

Revenue 53

Revenue Face-to-face Scale Maximizer 53

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 5, 2016

Profound changes in the way customers buy, huge difficulties reaching and engaging prospects, more competition, faster sales cycles, fewer resources, time compression…… The list goes on. The challenges in “selling,” working with customers through their buying process are greater and more complex.

Face-to-face 48

Face-to-face Knowledge Base Territories System 48

Partners in Excellence

JULY 5, 2012

We want the line to run as efficiently as possible in fulfilling customer demand. They create inefficiencies and costs in the manufacturing process, as well as adversely impacting the ability to fulfill customer demand. In a perfect world, we would like to see smooth flow or progress through the sale/buying process.

Marketing 88

Marketing Sales Cycle Top of Funnel Sales Qualified Lead 88

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 20, 2012

The customer keeps deferring the decision, we have little control over it. We tend to look at our deal strategies in terms of “what’s next.” ” Based on where we are in the sales process and the customer is in their buying process, we identify the next steps or critical activities.

Forecasting 89

Forecasting Face-to-face Closing Sales Cycle 89

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 24, 2014

By now, you know my obsession with strong Selling Processes. One of the things I’ve discovered as a result of my diatribes, is many sales managers really don’t know how to reinforce the sales process in their coaching and development of their sales teams. Effective managers manage the process, not transactions.

Sales Process 94

Sales Process Coaching Top of Funnel Follow-up 94

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 18, 2012

We’re at the very end of the sales process–there’s not a whole lot we can do to adjust our strategies to win. Deals are won and lost in the discovery phase of the sales/buying process. The time we spend trying to figure out how to win the deal in these last phases is almost too little too late.

Top of Funnel 91

Top of Funnel Funnel Coaching Churn 91

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 10, 2018

Despite what each person said, at every level of management, we’d always add our own “English” on the forecast… “John is always overly optimistic, Jill sandbags every forecast……” We knew the forecast would never be perfect, but it needed to be as accurate as possible.

Forecasting 48

Forecasting Pipeline Sales Forecasts Margin 48

Igniting Sales Transformation

JULY 18, 2018

In this interview, you’ll learn how the rules have changed —customers are more educated, resourceful and directive than at any other time in history. help our customers meet the changing market demands). His organizational execution of our techniques directly contributed to their success.

Vendor 76

Vendor Software Software Video 76

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

We start our days already with too much on our plates. Tweets, texts, phone calls all compete for our attention. We look at our schedules, meeting after mindless meeting, phone calls, web conferences. We struggle with organizing our time, dealing with interruptions, juggling schedules and priorities.

Intent 85

Intent Face-to-face Guidelines Call-back 85

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 11, 2012

We look at things like our sales process–is our sales process maximizing our ability to connect with our customers, to create value in their buying process and to maximize our ability to win? Are we achieving our goals in the shortest time possible?

Maximizer 87

Maximizer Territories Resources Sales Cycle 87

Partners in Excellence

AUGUST 19, 2014

It’s not that forecasts aren’t important, it’s just that we spend way too much time in the forecasting process. Great forecasts start with several things: A sales process that each person uses rigorously in executing their deal strategies. A great sales process is based on our best practices in winning deals.

Forecasting 95

Forecasting Pipeline Sales Cycle Call-back 95