Guest Blogger Sharon Drew Morgen – HELPING BUYERS DECIDE

We have a new guest blogger in the ranks and while our worlds are different, her words ring true throughout the sales world.

One of the aims in sales, lately, is to help buyers buy. Unfortunately, we in sales continue to focus on selling a solution. And when we say we want to ‘help buyers buy’ that means we want to make it easier for them to make a purchasing decision and choose our solution.

But sales treats a need as if it were an isolated event. We haven’t been trained to realize that ‘needs’ arise in our buyer’s environments as part of a tangle of other issues that are going on. So a team building program is necessitated by a merger, by team members from disparate cultures joining together, by folks being laid off, by people being resentful they have been given new jobs, etc. Until buyers either resolve or garner buy-in from, the internal issues that necessitated the ‘need’ and hold it in place daily, they cannot bring in a solution without disrupting the other elements. And the time it takes them to do that is the length of the sales cycle.

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An amazing opportunity from Tibor Shanto – The Ultimate Appointment Making Workshop

#sales #toronto

The Ultimate Appointment Making Workshop rides again. If you follow the blog you know I rarely promote other people’s events. Even the Sales Bloggers Union rarely gets a plug on my site, since most of what they focus on is not for the Sales Evangelist. That said, here is one serious exception.

Tibor, from Renbor Sales is one of my mates in the Union. He is brilliant, as are the rest of my colleagues, and here is an event anyone in the Toronto area who wants to improve their selling prowess should attend.

374 South Service
Oakville, Ontario L6J 2X6

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

More great stuff from Mr. Inside Sales

A while ago, I referred a great book from Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales. Now I wanted to share some wisdom from his 5 CD set and recommend that any dialer with the blues heed his sage wisdom.

If you’re struggling right now, ask yourself: “Would you want someone to catch your current attitude?”

If not, then take it from Mike – be aggressive, be positive, and expect things to turn around as they will. And in the meantime, don’t let your prospect’s attitude affect you – rather, concentrate on infecting them with your “Can Do” attitude. You’ll both be better off for it!

So start today – script out a positive response to the common negative attitudes you’ll run into this week. Practice being positive on each call, and learn and develop a recession-proof attitude!

For more specific sales training, invest in yourself and your team by purchasing Mike’s 5-CD Series: “How To Double Your Income Selling Over the Phone.” Visit his website for more information:

www.MrInsideSales.com

(I get nothing for this, as I am not an affiliate. I just like Mike’s attitude.)

Sales Process – Next year, the best story wins

Sales Training alert! beep squawk beep beep, this is a sales training alert for the global sales community. This is a real emergency, do not try and change your web browser as this sales training alert is essential to your survival as a super star. Whether you are at a fortune 500, a startup tech company, or a retail outlet, the is your sales training alert.

Do you find yourself giving 40% discounts in the second week of March, in July? if the answer is yes, then by all means drop your pants next week. If not, you may find that all it did was force you to give obscene discounts no the second of January. (more…)

Ask the coach about CRM: Some great tools for the Sales Evangelist

A reader and great friend to the entrepreneur,

Cheryl Liquori, asked me the following:

“Do you have any knowledge of, or experience, working with ZOHO.com for CRM?  I’m not interested in the desktop applications, but only in the CRM.  I\’ve read reviews, but they seem to focus on large enterprise applications.  For the sole propriator on a shoe string, wrestling with excel and overwhelmed by user-unfriendly ACT, I was wondering about zoho as an alternative.  Your expert thoughts?”

Now you all know I support Landslide as the ultimate Workstyle system. If you need something that focuses o the sales process, YOU MUST ADD LANDSLIDE TO YOUR TOOLKIT!

What you do not know is that I am designing a fully automated CRM system for a client that is based on the combo dialer-crm Insidesales.com. These guys have designed a complete system that allows you to do anything via javascript. I am literally making it so reps can make 200-300 quality calls a day with almost no admin work. EVERYTHING IS AUTOMATED BY A BUTTON CLICK!

If you are CRM hunting, let me know, as I get a referral fee for either of the above.

Now back to the question. What a coincidence! I found Zoho and have loaded one of my clients into it. Mind you, I havenever talked to the company, but intend to!

As their sole sales person for my startup client I have started using it for everything. Frankly, it is awesome! I believe it is based on SugarCRM, but SalesForce look out. At a price of $12/mo after 3 FREE USERS, this is going to get the small businesses, entrepreneurs, individual consultants… onboard and adopting.

So far:

1.  Fast, I mean super fast

2. Complete sales and marketing system with all of the trimmings

3. The reporting is easy to use

4. Forecast tool is great

5. Opportunities are called potentials, how adorable!

6. Uploads work really well.

7. Mimics the standard SalesForce, SugarCRM, Netsuite methodology of lead to accounts.

8. Really flexible design

9. Did I mention that the first 3 users are free?

10. Upgradeable to an enterprise system with a load of featers for $25 a user. YES I SAID $25 A USER!

I would strongly recommend any small budget player with little demands on automation to play with this system prior to looking at anything else.