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Most salespeople hate cold calling. Well, the alternative to making cold calls is getting leads to come to you — in other words, referrals. Often salespeople will ask new customers for a name or two at the end of the sales call, yet these leads rarely turn out to be solid, so they give up […]

Many successful salespeople end up moving into a sales management role. This can happen at the request of upper management or simply because you feel it’s the next step on your career path. And sales management can indeed be an excellent choice — it ranks high on US News & World Report’s Best Careers lists […]

CRM is short for customer relationship management. Its purpose is to manage the company’s relationship with its customers in a way that encourages them to be happy and loyal. Many large companies have highly technical and complex CRM strategies. One common component of a CRM is the membership card offered for free by many supermarkets. […]

The sales pipeline is actually shaped more like a funnel. It’s at its widest at the beginning of the sales cycle, where you must feed in many leads for every sale you eventually close. That’s why it is crucial to have lots and lots of leads to play with. The exact number of leads per […]

Unavoidable Steps of a Sales Cycle Most sales follow roughly the same pattern. It’s a cycle of seven different steps, starting with prospecting and ending when you ask your new customer for referrals. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. For example, if someone calls you because they’re thinking about buying, you can skip […]

When you first reach a prospect, the temptation is often to try to sell your product then and there. Resist this urge! Your job is to sell a face-to-face meeting. Only telemarketers try to close a sale over the phone, and that approach is exactly why they have dismal closing ratios. In order to move […]

Prospecting for leads is the first step in the sales cycle. But not all leads are created equal — and what might be a really good lead for one salesperson is garbage for another. So before you invest your time and money on any lead source, confirm that you’ll be getting a good value for […]

Great salespeople aren’t born, they’re made. The key attributes that make someone a good salesperson are all skills rather than talents — meaning they’re things that we learn and not things that we’re born with. What your inborn attributes do is determine which kind of sales approach you’ll be most comfortable with. Within that framework, […]