When is price a strategy? Almost never.

Some start-ups think low price is a good strategy to hook those important, first customers. On the other end there's the successful products at the end of their life cycle, with lots of competition, where product managers and sales teams use price as a means to extend product life. In my experience using price or any offers that focus on the customer paying less for your product when there has been no change in COGS, is a sign you may no longer have a real value proposition....

Reliability: Practicing The HP Way and a Lew Platt sales tool

On multiple occasions Lew would say, “Being reliable to our customers is one of the best sales tools we have.” He learned that from Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, practiced it and passed it on to his employees. While it sounds obvious, the extent to which HP would go to deliver on commitments was what earned it the awards, in the 1980s, as the best sales and support organization in the industry. ...

Executive field visits – Conflict or Conquest?

Hosting your executives on sales calls can cause great results or they can just be a lot of work and consternation. They can allow your executives to see and hear the real challenges your face or you can put on a pretty show that draws false conclusions. Executives can make things better or worse by the tone they set. Are executives there to help, as they should, or are they there just to highlight areas where the field needs to work even harder? Which situation do you have?...

Building your own 30-3-30 Exchange

As i've said in earlier writings, it's important to prepare for all kinds of chance customer exchanges. It starts with being clear on the most important value propositions you have to deliver to your customers. Building the 30-Second Exchange, as I did before meeting with Michael Dell, forces you to become very crisp on your most important value propositions. From there you can build 3-Minute and 30-Minute Exchanges that prepare you for any impromptu interaction with prospective or existing customers....

Golf: Is it a required sales skill?

Golf is a popular way that sales people, and business people in general, use to develop customer and partner relationships. But it isn't the only way to develop long standing relationships and it can have negative results. Here's a short, hopefully fun read on how golf worked, or didn't work, for me in doing business....

Three things customers learn about you… when you lose

In B2B selling you will likely have an opportunity to compete for business with a customer who didn't choose you the first time. Knowig that, it's important to know that you aren't the only one who learns from your failures. Customers also learn when you fail and what they see can be the difference between getting that next opportunity or not. See how to ensure you get that next opportunity....

Product People: Assuming sales people are native leads to lost sales

Product people sometimes ignore feedback claiming that all sales people will always side with the customer and are not to be trusted. It's called going native. That is a certain way of missing valuable information, alienating customers and, of course, losing business. As Randy Jackson, of American Idol, would say, 'sales people are in it to win it' just like product people. Find out why this assumption is bad....

Winning Lifelong Customers with The Five Abilities
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