Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

In the “good old days,” perhaps 10+ years ago, salespeople were the primary source of information about potential solutions for their customers. Customers and prospects sought sales people to learn about new solutions, trends in the markets, what other similar companies were doing. Our customers are drowning in information!

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Social Media Channels Conference Trends 117

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 6, 2021

The problems our customers face are complex. We understand them, we understand how to deal with the complexity, we start taking it for granted, not realizing we may be confusing the customer. Sometimes, we wear our ability to address the complex with a “badge of honor.” It’s understandable.

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Revelation Face-to-face Enterprise Enterprise 126

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 1, 2021

Ideally, we are spending as much time as possible, working with our customers to help move them through their buying process. At the same time, customers are engaging sales people for only a small time in their buying process. Are we maximizing our contribution to the customer in those ‘meetings?

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Meeting Customer Objections Maximizer 118

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 18, 2021

Ideally, we are spending as much time as possible, working with our customers to help move them through their buying process. At the same time, customers are engaging sales people for only a small time in their buying process. Are we maximizing our contribution to the customer in those ‘meetings?

Meeting 118

Meeting Customer Objections Maximizer 118

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

Every nuance of marketing, sales, customer experience, business, dating (oops) talk about best practices. The products and services offered may be very different and targeting different types of customers. The customers may be very different. Best practices can be helpful, but they are just a starting point.

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Face-to-face Vendor Consumer Video 115

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 5, 2019

This post is the eighth post in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. What happens is that we become prisoners of our own experiences. As sales people, and within our own companies, we have an advantage.

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Customer Face-to-face Consultative Selling Up-Sell 67

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 10, 2019

This post is the eleventh post in my series on Sensemaking. The previous posts focus on how we can align and become sensemakers in working with our customers. This will focus on how we look at our own organizations. Also, earlier in this series, I went through each quadrant–from the customer perspective.

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Face-to-face Enterprise Enterprise Up-Sell 56

Partners in Excellence

MAY 30, 2019

This post is the fourth in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. What’s this mean for sales people, hoping to be “sensemakers” to their customers? They might be anything but that.

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Customer Chemicals Face-to-face Enterprise 81

Partners in Excellence

AUGUST 6, 2019

As I reflected on the question, I think we can only discover the answer by changing the question, “Why do customers need sales people any more?” Customers are relying, increasingly, on other sources of information. Stated differently, what the majority of sales people currently do creates little value to the customer.

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Face-to-face Groups Outbound Data 77

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 11, 2019

If you have missed the previous posts, The links to all the others in this series, please go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. As you might have guessed, I’m trying to make sense of sensemaking myself. Recognize your customers may not know where they are or be able to articulate it.

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Ideal Customer Profile Face-to-face Hiring eBook 56

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 8, 2023

Everything we look at, in our societies continues to change and what people do in those roles evolve along with it. It serves both our customers and our own companies better–more effectively and efficiently. And it will continue to enable customers to do more and more “self serve.” No surprise!

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Face-to-face Groups Course Survey 68

Partners in Excellence

MAY 21, 2020

Our purpose provides grounding, something that, when challenged, we come back to in trying to figure our path forward. Using Simon Sinek’s popular terminology, our purpose provides us our “Why? Using Simon Sinek’s popular terminology, our purpose provides us our “Why?”

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ACT Ideal Customer Profile Positioning Strategy 114

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 4, 2019

It’s been a tactic many exploit in competitive situations, perhaps the thinking being creating FUD within the customer about the competitive vendor, or creating FUD around making a decision not in favor of us. ” It provoked my thoughts about FUD, particularly around the issues of sensemaking and decision confidence.

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Face-to-face Vendor Competition Customer 62

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 2, 2020

He posed the question, “What’s the worst question you can ask a customer?” But the problem is, the customer (or even your own people) don’t know how to answer the question. Our customers and our people don’t know how to answer the “How can I help” question.

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Face-to-face Cancellation Exercises Customer 121

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 20, 2020

It seems odd to write a post for sales professionals (and unprofessionals), posing the question, “Are You Curious About Who Your Customer Is?” But, sadly, too many sales people don’t really care about who their customers are. Our customers cannot be defined in terms of what they are buying.

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Customer Face-to-face LinkedIn Facebook 96

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 8, 2021

It’s imperative that we continue to evolve our thinking on value and value creation. Way back, in the old days, we created value for our customers by educating them about new products and solutions. Customers didn’t have the web back then, search was a foreign concept.

Face-to-face 126

Face-to-face Education Trade Show Channels 126

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 15, 2022

Most of our “sales processes” are failing us. We design it to be a relatively linear progression of activities we undertake with the customer. We design it to be a relatively linear progression of activities we undertake with the customer. There are a couple of core reasons we’ve found.

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Sales Process Face-to-face Sales Relationals 81

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 23, 2020

All of our customers have customers of their own, though they may not recognize that. They may be “real customers,” that is people/organizations they sell to. They may be “internal,” customers. Sometimes, particularly for internal customers, our customers forget about this.

Customer 84

Customer Cancellation Opportunity Relationals 84

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 15, 2021

Recently, I’ve been reading a series of discussions debating the concept, “Can we really be driven by helping our customers while still focused on selling?” Moreover, doing this maximizes the value we create with our customers and maximizes our own performance. Sadly, too many do this.

Ideal Customer Profile 81

Ideal Customer Profile Customer Maximizer Call-back 81

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 8, 2019

When you bite into an apple you get that resounding crunch, biting into an orange you just get a squish. Solutions selling is deployed where customers have very complex buying processes–the space of unknown knowns or unknown unknowns*. Let’s imagine that for some reason you want to evaluate the performance of apples.

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Comparison Solutions Selling Relationals Consultative Selling 62

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 19, 2022

We struggle with customer/prospect engagement. Our autodialers help us make 1000’s of calls, in the hopes that one person will pick up. We know we have to reach customers through multiple channels. Yet customers aren’t responding. We talk about what we want to talk about–which is our products.

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Revelation Customer Channels Discount 78

Partners in Excellence

AUGUST 8, 2019

Buying, more accurately, what our buyers face isn’t simple. In fact, every piece of research indicates buyers, customers, are overwhelmed with complexity. The data on buying, as well as the data on internal problem solving success (buying is just a component of the problem/opportunity solving process), demonstrates this struggle.

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Face-to-face Buyer Sales Talent Vendor 87

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 8, 2020

This doesn’t mean we will continue to be in “crisis mode,” but the actions we take today, individually and organizationally, shape our futures. How we treat our people, how we treat our customers, how we treat our suppliers will shape our futures.

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Face-to-face Scale Salary Retail 88

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 25, 2022

A question came up, “Dave you talk about how we differentiate ourselves through creating value with the customer, helping them make sense of what they are trying to achieve, helping them have great confidence in their decision. But a large part of our business is RFP’s. ” As a result the focus is on pitching products.

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Government Buying Cycle Construction Up-Sell 70

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 20, 2020

Everyday, we are learning things that help us deal with the challenges presented by the virus and it’s impact on our lives, companies, nations, and economy. Everyday, we are learning things that help us deal with the challenges presented by the virus and it’s impact on our lives, companies, nations, and economy.

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Face-to-face Relationals Study Objections 101

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 16, 2021

We are seeing a profound shift in buying, with customers preferring digital engagement channels to sales engagement. I am beginning to explore what this means for our overall engagement strategies, moving from a sales led, digitally supported to a digitally led, sales supported process. This is a long article.

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Sales Process Lead Rank Ideal Customer Profile Channels 94

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

It is the way for us to “develop relationships,” extend our reach, capture new prospects and customers. I remember our “gangs” would travel bar to bar, event to event, often having contests of how many people could we meet, how we could have fun for a few minutes, and, possibly, get laid.

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Social Selling Scale LinkedIn Networking 91

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 27, 2022

” Though many of our customers might think this about salespeople, and many within our organizations might agree. Personally, I despise shopping–not because of the retail sales people, just because buying online is so much easier. Already we script every word and every step of our selling process.

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Retail Face-to-face Trends B2B 68

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 4, 2019

We get so busy in the activities we do in our jobs that we don’t understand what our jobs are. Of course, we have some idea–if we are sales people, we have to get out and sell, we have to make our quotas. If we are SDRs, we have to follow our scripts, make our numbers for outbound/inbound calls, create SQLs or SALs.

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Face-to-face Resources Compensation Outbound 62

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 8, 2019

This trend is, unfortunately, doing exactly the opposite of what our customers need and what enables us to create the greatest value with them. These are about the only things that customers value in their interaction with sales people. I’ve not been following my normal cadence of blog posts the past couple of weeks.

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Hiring Face-to-face Sales Cycle Account 77

Partners in Excellence

MAY 27, 2019

Whether it’s our personal lives, our communities, our societies, our jobs, our companies, our customers, our markets, our nations. Just as we seem to think we are dealing with the issues we face, all of a sudden things change. As human beings we are driven to achieve.

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Face-to-face Customer Lead Rank Sales Talent 79

Partners in Excellence

MAY 29, 2019

Preface: This is the third article in my series on sensemaking, for links to all the others in this series, please go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. I’ll provide you references to some that may be useful to consider in your own sensemaking pursuits.

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Face-to-face ACT Enterprise Enterprise 85

Partners in Excellence

JULY 15, 2020

We face impacts personally, to our families and communities. We face issues within our jobs, functions, our organizations. We face issues within our jobs, functions, our organizations. They become more complex as we work with our customers, partners, suppliers; just as they are facing the same types of challenges.

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Face-to-face Customer Lead Rank Scale 127

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 20, 2020

This assembly line process starts with a widget (let’s call them customers), being passed from person to person down the line until they come out closed or on the reject (loss) pile. The thinking is, “We will get our fair share of deals through this process.” Both articles are outstanding. But is that the answer?

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Ideal Customer Profile Lead Rank Maximizer Engineering 140

Partners in Excellence

JULY 4, 2020

Our collective worlds have been disrupted and changed forever. Whether it’s how we interact in our communities or businesses, everything has changed. The nature of work has changed forever–and that change is not just virtual. All of this is a sure path to failure–or at best–just getting by.

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Lead Rank Face-to-face Lead Scoring Intent 106

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 5, 2019

This post is the seventh in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. The problem with the Chaotic space is that it isn’t just more complex than the Complex space. It’s been a long and very technical journey.

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Customer Enterprise Enterprise Face-to-face 59