SalesHQ

Dave Wedzina detests pushy salespeople. Like many of today's shoppers, the Lackawanna man likes to do his own research and make his own purchasing choices. Sure, he wants a sales associate to be around if he has questions, but he doesn't like feeling "sold to." "I want them to say, 'If you need any assistance, my name is Fred,' not 'I've ...

   They speak with the eyes of truth believing what they see is the truth.     When adults want the brutal truth they should speak to a child. A small child is fascinating to listen to and to watch, they react with action. They do not take what is stated and dissect it trying to discover a motive. They react to ...

Right this minute, you are probably sitting on tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of commissions. Most registered reps have a database of current and past clients whose potential referrals are worth several thousand additional commission dollars per month. Yet, this resource goes virtually untapped for most advisors. Why? Simply because most reps have not learned how ...

When I provide speech coaching for executives and when I direct Presentation Skills seminars for corporations, one of the first points I make is this: Trying to be perfect will ruin your presentation. Why? h4. First: People want to deal with human beings, not flawless robots. To illustrate: When you hear a speaker who is oh-so-precise with enunciation, so programmed with ...

There it sits on your desk—the telephone. You hold ambivalent feelings about using this device. On the one hand, you hear high-income professionals testify that they “dialed for dollars”—almost fanatically—on their way to the top. On your more successful days, you agree with them. Yet at other times, when you struggle with gatekeepers, voice mail connections instead of live respondents, unreturned ...

How much of your day do you spend on the phone? How about checking and answering e-mail? As important as your laptop or desktop may be, your smartphone has arguably become the most important tool in your personal tech arsenal. The right one can make you more efficient, better connected, and more attractive to the opposite sex. (Well, two out of ...

2009 will probably be your toughest year in business. This sounds like a negative way to start but it is very positive. Stay with me on this one and you’ll find ways you can take your business — and your personal life —- to some new levels you’ve wanted for a long time. We are in a different world today than ...

Companies, when they interview, focus their attention on learning about the candidate. However, equal importance should be placed on the candidate interviewing them so that both sides can make a solid decision on the relationship. My wife Sharon and I dated for exactly two years before I proposed to her. Over our two year courtship, I got to know her likes ...

Are you like over 85% of all salespeople, professionals, and business owners who find acquiring high quality referrals from your customers and clients difficult and frustrating? You’ve heard the sermons about how referrals are the best marketing method there is—and then discovered that few generate enough high quality referrals to actually make referrals a significant part of their marketing plan? Like ...

"My salespeople need to get better at closing," the Vice President of Sales said to me shortly after I arrived in his office. If I've heard that line once, I've heard it a hundred times. Despite being on an important sales call, I couldn't help but cringe. You see, I will never, ever train people on closing techniques if they sell ...

The responsibility for ensuring that every member of the sales team is successful and performing at optimum levels lies entirely with management and below are the eight reasons why sales people fail. In fact, I usually ask just three very straightforward questions, in order to identify why a salesperson is underachieving i.e., • Are they visiting/talking to enough clients/prospects? In other ...

Here is a quick checklist to evaluate your own listening habits. I got this list from a recent article that I read by Rick Phillips. Try to be brutally honest with yourself and see how you do. Do you ever catch yourself looking at your watch while you are listening? Do you ever finish other people’s sentences? Do your ever find ...

  8.06.09    Teamwork     It is amazing how many similarities there are between sales and baseball.  The teams are competing against one another. The teams are trying to get to the top and win the prize. The ultimate goal is to be the only team left standing.  The team is required to win one game at a time. Each team has ...

As a manager, executive or business owner your top priority today is exceeding company goals. You can't do it yourself, so the best way to exceed your goals is to have what we call "High Performance Teams" working for you.   High performance teams are a special class of team that has the ability to easily adapt in a rapidly changing ...

    Richard A. Hilliard   A rose has never knocked a man off his horse   This is a line in a movie and I thought what a great concept when applied to sales. Each sales professional has a process that they follow. Depending on how engaging the sales person is determines how powerful it is with the client.  Is ...

Nineteenth-century Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted gave the world a legacy of discoveries, including one that all of us in sales today can appreciate. Hear me out here, I promise this will be worth it! Oersted discovered electromagnetism, which we can all credit as the basis for many of the comforts of modern life. However, there’s another angle to Oersted’s story ...

We hate to admit it, because we personally feel that clothes shouldn’t matter. In a perfect world, a person would be judged at their workplace based solely on their performance. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. How you choose to dress each morning reflects how you feel about your job – that you take your position seriously, that you are ...

In essence there are two combat strategies regarding objections. The first is pre-empting them – in other words, by anticipating and responding to the objection before the prospect has even had a chance to voice it. The second is by dealing with the objection as it arises. If you are prepared to incorporate both strategies then you’ll encounter fewer objections and ...

Cold calling is dead, but still kicking. It's not to say that cold calling doesn't work, but everyone will agree, it's highly inefficient and very demotivating. Therefore, cold calling should go away, but it won’t. I stopped at my Starbucks today and saw a vitamin or similar sales rep recruiting a new employee. I overheard some words such as "pitch" and ...

1. Who Needs What You Have? Don't say everyone. This attitude makes cold calling overwhelming, and you'll get lots of rejections. You must establish a list of criteria, and here's where your boss and other successful salespeople can help you. Ask them, "What are the characteristics of our/your 3 best customers?" Get them to think deeply about the specifics -- the ...