0Having a good mentor is more than half a battle won. If you think about any successful person, they typically have one thing in common: a mentor. Nearly every single successful person in history had someone who they could confide in and learn from when times were tough.
When you have a mentor, you are learning from someone who has already arrived at where you want to be. They know exactly what it takes to get there and what sacrifices need to be made.
Many people don’t have just one mentor – they rely on the power of countless experts they get in contact with, and learn from both their mistakes and successes and try to implement them into their own business and into their own life.
Inc shared best business proposal tips from sales experts. Many times we can rely on the expertise of the professionals to improve our business skills, and this is particularly true when it comes to proposals.
Writing a jumbled proposal with a bunch of numbers written on a page might lead you to a dead end. Taking the time to ensure your proposal is well written is the key to landing more deals and earning more business. The proposal requires an outline of what you can do for that client, how you’re going to do it, and how much it will cost them.
Improve Your Email Game
On their blog, MailChimp shares 10 ways to increase welcome email effectiveness. We’ve talked about the importance of email numerous times, and it seems that this is a bountiful subject.
When writing welcome emails, you need to think about the needs of your new customers, what you can offer, how to come across using the right tone and make sure to include the most relevant questions, such as a social media follow or referral. Most of all, you need to start the relationship off the right way and encourage future actions from the customer.
If you need a push on how to write better emails, Yesware claims this is the only email format you need to get replies and it includes four templates to help you refresh your email game.
The Entrepreneur is also providing an interesting read by a guest writer John Chernov on how he offered a job to a person who sent a perfect pitch email. He shares what differentiated that one sender from the rest, and also what you should avoid doing at all costs unless you want your emails to be instantly archived.
Unfortunately, such extraordinary sales reps don’t just stumble upon us. Or at least the chances are very low. That is why we need to learn to recognize them or at least recognize their potential.
Inc. is sharing tips for hiring high-performing sales reps that will help you in your process of picking the right candidates for this position. Now, we should clearly state that the sales process has changed over the past decade. Buyers have become sophisticated and well informed. Often, they’re coming to the sales conversation with a very clear vision of what they want and how much they want to pay. In addition, the increase in marketing noise has made them skeptical of companies’ and sales reps’ claims.
The foundation for overcoming buyers’ skepticism is credibility, “the quality of being trusted and believed in.” To diagnose low credibility when interviewing sales professionals, ask yourself: Does this person oversell or exaggerate? Do their stories line up? Are their claims just a little too good to be true?
Building relationships
SalesforLife explains why relationships are key to success in sales and this time they are talking about how we can build relationships using social media.
Salespeople want to show the other person that they actually care about the things that are important to them. This is mandatory if we want to be successful with both personal and business relationships. The good news is – the technology that is available today makes this really easy if we know how to use it properly.
Get to know what’s going on in their world, for instance: What they are talking about online, if their job has changed, if they’re publishing any content, what kind of story their online reviews are telling, the current state of their industry and marketplace, and so on. Even personal things about the person you want to connect with like their hobbies and volunteering work can be useful.
Once you know what their world looks like and what their pain points are, you’ll have a good idea of how you can do something meaningful to add value to their world. If you put yourself in your prospect’s shoes, you’re 90% of the way there already.
The Entrepreneur is taking a different path of building a relationship with your prospect and sharing tricks to instantly connect with any sales prospect. They oppose the old-school saying “Your prospects need to like you. People only buy from people they like.” and believe that instead of trying to be more “likable”, you should focus on being trustworthy and respectable, so that they can rely on you.
Sales pipelines are often defined as the buyer’s steps from lead to customer, but actually, they’re the labels your marketing and sales organizations use to categorize the expected activities and outcomes as they pursue a sale and interact with buyers.
The problem is, these stages usually don’t consider the buyer’s point of view. By definition, it’s the perspective of your organization about a prospect as they move the buyers through your sales process.
The Akoonu is going in details about the sales pipelines, and according to them, in order to create a buyer-centric experience, you do need to orient and familiarize your marketers and sales reps with how buyers are thinking.
Video in Sales Process
We just mentioned that “the sales process has changed over the past decade“ and it has made room for the video. We all understand that the most powerful medium is a face-to-face conversation, but since it’s not always possible to meet our prospect in person, video conferencing or video messaging is the best alternative.
HubSpot is sharing the science behind video’s power of selling, that will give you more insight into the importance of video involvement in your selling efforts, and SalesLoft is bringing 3 more takeaways from using video in their sales process.
It seems that video will overtake the sales in its entirety. Or not, we could argue for sure. But, we should definitely take advantage of the freshness and possibilities that come along with it.
Week in Sales No 15 – Wrap up
These are some of the articles we found to be most interesting in sales during this week of sales knowledge sharing.
Did you read or write anything that could help us learn something new?
If so, feel free to contact us and send us interesting links, we’d be happy to share the article with the world
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