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How Skill Development Gets You To The Championship

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The “March Madness” basketball tournament, formally known as the NCAA Mens/Womens Basketball Championship, is the pinnacle showcase for skill mastery in the collegiate basketball world. This year, my alma mater, the Aztecs of San Diego State University (SDSU), had a spectacular run-up to the championship match.  

What The Aztecs did so well is similar to the work we do with our customers’ sales teams, albeit in a different “business setting.” Coach Brian Dutcher of SDSU has refined and reinforced their process (sports leaders will often call it a system), relied on tools, committed to Coaching and focused on continuous skill improvement.  

For his team, those skills include bouncing and shooting a ball, playing defense, and getting rebounds. For the sales teams we work with, the key skills are proactively developing new business, identifying business objectives, establishing value, accessing key players, managing the buying process, and (of course) negotiating and closing. 

How are you getting better today? Are your sales leaders doing everything they can do to ensure that all customer-facing roles have the skills they need to win? Don’t wait to improve—the competition sure won’t.  

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On The Road Again: Kennedy Space Center

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LEoXD6yHftQ

 

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Aid For Ukraine

There are times in our lives when watching an event unfold where we know that we have to do something. Moving on to the next thing on our daily To Do list is just not enough.

In March of this year, I received a strong message that I needed to help the victims of the war in Ukraine. And it’s a confusing feeling, as what I can I do, other than donating money, from 6,000 miles away from the conflict?

Enter John P. Lynch, my friend (introduced by Stephen O’Connor) who is originally from the East Coast of the USA, and the Founder and Director of the Corporate Aid for Ukraine John created CAU to help the Ukrainians who were pouring into Poland to escape the conflict. He has lived near Krakow for a long time with his family and sent ideas on where I could go to volunteer in June.

The Multicultural Centre in Krakow (here is a sign-up sheet if you want to volunteer: https://ib-polska.pl )  was the organization that I chose, a group that established a clothes collection and distribution center in Krakow. On arrival to the group, I was given a Health and Safety briefing, an introduction to other volunteers for the shifts, and put to work in the warehouse.

Initially, I worked at the front door of the facility to greet the refugees who were coming to get donated clothing. My counterpart was a young Ukrainian woman who spoke Polish, English, and Ukrainian. We managed the headcount of the beneficiaries, made small talk and smiled, and kept the line moving in an orderly capacity.

Some people seemed fine, while others had a faraway look that reflected the grief they were enduring having walked away from their homes with just the clothes on their backs. One woman, with tears in her eyes, showed us a picture of her 19-year-old son who was still in Ukraine. Over 400 people went through the lines each day, mostly women and children, as men above 16 and younger than 60 were required to stay in Ukraine.

During the afternoons of my shifts with the volunteer team, we unpacked boxes of donated clothes into the various categories for women, men, and children by size, function, etc. This was a great opportunity to meet and speak with the other volunteers, many of them who had a direct connection with a Ukrainian family member or loved one. Their stories of how and why they arrived to help were beautiful and inspirational.

If you can, sign up to help these organizations who are combating the atrocity of this war. The perspective I gained is hard to put into written words or when sharing the stories with others. In my opinion, we are all one and have to help each other while standing up to those who would harm others. Until next time, peace to the victims of the war and the wonderful volunteers I met in Krakow.

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Selling Power Names Flannery Sales Systems a Leading Training Company in 2022

Selling Power, the leading media company for B2B sales leaders and the publisher of Selling Power magazine, has named Flannery Sales Systems a Leading Training Company in 2022.

FREDERICKSBURG, VA. (PRWEB) FEBRUARY 03, 2022

For over four decades, Selling Power has worked with sales training companies who help sales teams and executive leaders produce better revenue results for their companies. The Selling Power leadership team says this designation speaks to the best-in-class strategies and measurable ROI that Flannery Sales Systems delivers to its clients.

Selling Power founder and CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner says: “Flannery Sales Systems provides sales leaders with a proven sales process to create repeatable revenue generation that maintains focus on the customer. The wisdom and strategic insight Flannery Sales Systems provides is an extremely valuable resource for any sales leader who wants to help their sales team reach the next level of success in 2022.”

“Companies are finding that the marketplace is demanding that their sales organizations are focused and methodical,” says John E. Flannery, President of Flannery Sales Systems. “We train sales executives to define and implement a repeatable process dedicated to revenue generation. This approach reframes traditional selling behaviors and enhances the potential of individuals willing to embrace it.”

About Selling Power
In addition to Selling Power magazine, the leading publication for sales VPs since 1981, Selling Power Inc. produces the Sales Management Digest and Daily Boost of Positivity e-newsletters, as well as a series of five-minute videos featuring interviews with leading business executives. Selling Power is a regular media sponsor of the Sales 3.0 Conference. Learn more at http://www.sellingpower.com.

About Flannery Sales Systems, LLC
FSS is a leading sales process training company that works with customers to develop specific revenue generation programs. They also provide the supporting implementation services to help companies maximize their investment and drive results.

With 35 years of sales, sales management, and business ownership experience, FSS has a comprehensive understanding of how sales organizations run. The FSS team has worked with customers across 17 countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and the attendees of these programs represent 21 different languages.

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3 Leading Indicators That Drive Sales

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Purchasing in the business–to–business environment has changed in the last few years.  Buyers are more critical, more informed, and more careful with their spends. Their focused budgets have eroded sales, which has caused sales organizations to become hyper vigilant on lagging indicators like revenue, sales-to-quota, and close ratios as a measure of success. However, lagging indicators only allow for post–mortem analysis. 

Conversely, leading indicators allow for course correction before targets are missed. Here are three leading indicators that can help you reach your revenue goals. 

  1. Opportunity Pipeline Value – This is a good, early quantitative indicator.  This ratio should mirror your close ratio.  Do you close 1 out of every 3 opportunities?  Then you need 3 times the dollar amount in qualified opportunities to make your annual quota plan.  
  2. Meeting Summary – This is the best qualitative measure I know. A meeting summary is a written communication between buyer and seller. When this is a customer-facing document, then important analysis can happen. Managers can see whether this is a qualified opportunity or not and if the sales person is spending the appropriate amount of time to move the sale along. Also, sales people tend not to exaggerate the size of the opportunity when it is discussed and reflected back to the customer, which makes the pipeline totals more accurate.   
  3. Implementation Plan – This is another auditable, qualitative checkpoint. A clearly communicated plan between buyer and seller, crafted while the opportunity is still being developed, shows commitment on both sides. First of all, it’s auditable. A manager can look at the plan and offer steps that have been missed and strategies to ensure closing. Also, the probability to close increases to 80% when the customer is involved with an implementation plan, thus making the opportunity pipeline numbers more reliable and concrete. 

Above all leading indicators, it is the auditable documents that track the communication between buyer and seller that provide the most accurate lens for the “crystal ball” that we call sales forecasting.  Let us help your organization create auditable documents and an improved focus on leading indicators.   

 

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Will a Trade Show Help You Meet Your Sales Goals?

Sales and Trade Shows

Trade shows. As salespeople, it seems we either love ‘em or hate ‘em. If you’re a member of the sales team looking forward to a few days of schmoozing and staying in a nice hotel, you probably enjoy the experience. If you’re the sales manager in charge of meeting sales goals and managing a budget to ensure money is wisely spent, you probably don’t.

Being part of a trade show requires both a financial investment and a people one. Are trade shows worth it? It depends. For some companies, skipping a trade show attended by competitors would be akin to skipping your sister’s wedding: You just have to be there. For others, it’s an opportunity to schedule a lot of face-to-face meetings all within a short period of time and in one place. And there are other justifications such as brand awareness, publicity, etc.

Yet too often we see companies spending tens of thousands of dollars to participate in a trade show, then bemoan the lack of leads and closed deals that came out of it. In other words, they didn’t see the ROI they had hoped for.

Being Clear on Your Goals Can Help
And maybe hope is part of the problem. Making a trade show work for you requires advance planning and intensive measuring—starting with your goals. Because, as they say, if you don’t know where you’re going…

If you’re going to do a trade show and you want to make sure you can prove the value of doing so, make sure you’re clear on your goals for the show. What will you measure and how will you determine success both short-term and long-term? How many leads will you need to make it worthwhile, and how many sales later? How long of a timeline will you allow for tracking these metrics? What tool or process will you use to track them?

Is There a Better Way to Meet Your Goals?
If your objective is lead generation and eventually sales, is a trade show the way to do it? Maybe not. It could be spending your dollars in another area would generate better and longer-lasting results.

Here’s something to think about: Maybe you should consider investing in something like improving your team’s sales skills or an effective sales process. What kind of incremental improvements might you see if you had a process in place that increased your salespeople’s productivity? If they were better at qualifying leads? If they knew how to maximize the CRM system?

If you’re not generating an impressive ROI from your trade show attendance, maybe it’s time to skip one this year and invest that money in your people and processes instead. And then you’ll reap the benefits all year long, not just a couple of times per year.

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Six Things You Must Know Before Presenting Your Proposal

Business group meeting portrait - Five business people working together. A diverse work group.

There are six things you must know before you present a proposal to your prospect.  Your ability to conduct a professional and complete qualification of your prospect during the meetings leading up to this point in the sales cycle will provide you with the answers.  Here are the checkpoints:

1. You understand the prospect’s business objectives thoroughly and are able to provide a satisfactory solution.If you don’t understand the related challenges completely, how can you be sure you can suggest a solution that would be enthusiastically endorsed?

2. The prospect has to do something – it is NOT an option to keep things the same.

If the “status quo” is viable for the prospect, they might very well select that option.  Problems tend to fall into the “fix it” or “forget it” categories.  Unless there’s a compelling reason to change, most find it easier just to do nothing. Find the compelling reason why they’d want to go through the hassle of changing suppliers or implementing something new.  If they can’t present a compelling case for change, they probably won’t change.

3. You have access to the decision maker and will make your presentation to him/her.

A good rule of thumb is never to make a presentation to someone who can’t say “yes.”  It’s that simple.

4. The prospect needs to implement a solution in a time frame that makes sense for you from a business standpoint.Time kills deals.  What’s the point if your prospect doesn’t want to do anything for 18 months?  Too much can happen in the interim to send the deal sideways.

5. You understand the prospect’s selection criteria, and have a reasonable chance of meeting those criteria successfully. What are the top three things they’ll evaluate when selecting a business partner, and why are those things important?  This will give you a good handle on just how good your chances are.  If this is a price driven deal, for example, and you can’t or won’t compete on price alone, why try to compete at all?  It’s a very competitive world out there and your competitors are trying just as hard to win the business as you are.  You’ve got to know their strengths and weaknesses, how they’re likely to react in certain situations, how hard they’ll fight for the opportunity that you’re trying to win.

6. The prospect is considering only a small number of suppliers and is not putting the deal out to every company in the area. Generally, “RFPs” are not the most optimum type of business to win, since price plays such a major role in the selection process and the opportunity to communicate openly with the prospect is often quite limited.  Prospects whose attitude is “the more, the merrier” are more interested in price than a relationship.  Finally, increasing the number of options for the prospect decreases your chances of winning.

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Off The Road: Flute Meditation in Sedona

John traveled to Sedona to work with a customer at their national sales kickoff meeting. On one of his many hikes, he came across Robert, the flute player. Listen in on this soothing two minute escape for a break in your busy day.

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Marketing with Science

Who

My name is Courtney and I have spent my 13-year career in Sales and Marketing. The majority of that time has been in the scientific lab supply space and the remainder has been building and optimizing digital marketing campaigns for small to medium sized businesses.

I earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Masters of Business Administration, both from VA Tech and think the two disciplines go together like hydrogen and oxygen.

What

Marketing with Science is a marketing consulting business I’ve started that brings the structured approach of science to the revenue problems that plague businesses.

Remember “The Scientific Method”? You start with a hypothesis (a statement that you want to test that is a solution for a problem). You test it, collect data, analyze it and either adjust your hypothesis or solve your problem.

I focus on two main areas to create hypotheses and test them:

[1] Target Marketing

  • CLIENT 360 ANALYSIS – Who is your client? Why did they hire you? What do they like? What can be better?
  • BUYER PERSONAS – Who are your customers? What are their attributes, demographics and psychographics? Where do they hang out?
  • CLIENT EXPERIENCE – Are your clients happy? Are they succeeding? Are they using all of your offerings? How might they rate you?

[2] Revenue Process Design

  • YOUR USP – What is your unique selling proposition? What business are you in?
  • MESSAGING – What do your prime prospects want to hear? What might motivate them?
  • SALES STRATEGY – What does your sales effort look like? What should a sales person do?

Where

One could argue that this approach to solving revenue problems would not have been capable 15 years ago. The online space, digital marketing in particular, has provided insight into demographics and behavior unlike anything before.

There are different tools online (Social Media, CPC Ads, email, Content) that, when used correctly provide specific information to solve variables your business faces.

Why

There are a lot of variables that go into your business generating revenue. The more you can identify and define these variables, the better results you get with each go-to-market strategy.

Some examples of revenue-related variables: unique selling proposition, problem you solve, solution you offer, how you present your solution, who benefits from your solution, where they spend their time, target audience (demographics, geography, timing, title, decision maker etc.), etc.

When you need to increase sales, how confident are you in the levers you choose to pull?

When

Is there really a time when you can’t benefit from learning?

Whether you’re a new business and you don’t have any clients, or you’ve been around for 40 years and sales are maybe, shall we say, stagnant, even if you’re a business that’s established and revenue is rolling in — it’s worth it to understand why. What did you do (either now, in the past or not yet) that got people’s attention?

So if you have a business hypothesis you’d like to test or some variables you’d like to define to spend less, earn more or earn more…faster — let’s talk!

Marketingwithscience.com

 

 

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