Sometimes it’s just easy. You meet a person and connect. Conversation flows. You find common areas professionally and personally. Ideas bounce back and forth, and you start talking about how you can work on something together. Before you know it, work is under way, and the collaboration is the definition of one plus one equals three. Sometimes it ain’t easy. You meet a person, and they’re all business. Getting them to engage with you in any sense is slow. Painful. You open up and share, provide great ideas, and work hard to get the other person to see the value in working with you. It should be plain to see, but it’s not. You’re met with aloofness and suspicion. You try to engage on a personal level and ask, "How was your weekend?" His reply, "Fine." Then dead air...      

Imagine for a minute you sold everything you should be selling across all of your firm’s capabilities to your existing clients. If all the buying centers bought all of the capabilities they should be buying, how much would your key account sales increase? When people spend time analyzing this carefully, they find the potential to expand sales to existing clients is huge. Given the great potential for growth, many companies give proactive key account sales quite the effort, but few achieve the results they should. The problem is they can’t, or for some reason simply don’t, create their own opportunities.      

Negotiations are everywhere. From negotiating important sales opportunities to negotiating with our kids at bedtime, we’re constantly working to reach agreement with others. In this game of give and take, it’s too easy to get stuck, make mistakes, and lose big. Are you... ... getting beaten up in negotiations? ... dealing with savvy corporate purchasing departments? ... getting pushed to focus on price over value? ... losing deals you should have won? ... unsure how to respond to common buyer tactics? ... making an effort to "win-win" and still losing?      

Call it what you like: solution sales, consultative sales, consultative selling—at the core of each of these concepts is diagnosing and connecting the "pain" of the buyer with the products, services, and overall capabilities of the seller as "solutions." Pain + Diagnosis + Offerings as "Solution" = WIN! While this concept is still alive and necessary today, it has changed in 3 very important ways.   3 Ways Consultative Sales Methods Need to Change Understanding vs. Diagnosing Needs In consultative sales, there’s typically a heavy emphasis on the seller "diagnosing" the needs of the buyer. The need for diagnosis implies that the buyer doesn’t have a thorough understanding of why they find themselves in their current, undesirable situation or what to do differently. Through diagnosis, the seller figures this out like a doctor might with a patient who feels unwell, but who doesn’t know what they have or what to do to get better...      

Lots of things have changed in the world of sales, but some things have not. Building trust was important 50 years ago, and it's just as important today. When buyers trust sellers, they depend on them, listen to them, give them access, and spend time with them. Trust is critical for sales success. But today's buyers are busier than ever and, at the same time, have access to more information and choices. This makes their time harder to get, and their trust harder to build. While researching our new book, Insight Selling, we found that building trust is one of 6 key drivers of client loyalty and one of the top 10 things sales winners do. Yet most sellers agree they could do a better job of deepening and strengthening trust. Trust in sales is built around three factors—competence, integrity, and intimacy. Following are seven ideas for building trust in each...      

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season with peace and cheer in the New Year. RAIN Group is pleased to make a charitable donation on behalf of our clients to the Heart Center at Boston Children's Hospital, which is at the forefront of pediatric heart care and research.      

I received a call the other day from someone selling website tracking software. We already use a marketing automation tool like this. I mentioned it to the seller. He then went on a rant about how he visited our website, recognized the tool we use, and how we weren't doing it right. I don't know this guy. He knows nothing about our marketing and sales process. He knows nothing about the types of customers we're trying to reach. He knows nothing about our sales cycle or marketing philosophy. Yet he felt he knew enough to tell me we're doing it all wrong. I know there are always ways to improve what we're doing, and I look forward to critical feedback. In fact I often seek out experts asking them for their advice on how we can do things better.      

The world around us is shifting—in virtually every way. Savvy sellers have caught on to the fact that B2B buying behavior is changing as well. The economic downturn has had a lingering impact on the market. Corporations have caught on to new ways of staying lean and reducing costs while maintaining productivity. Coupled with the rise of the Internet and the abundance of information available to buyers, business is being conducted differently than it was just twenty years ago. As a former buyer, corporate executive, management consultant and trainer, I've been at the forefront of observing these changes as they happen. And make no mistake: the world of buying (and selling) will never be the same again. If you're still longing for the "good old days," perhaps now the time has come to move on and embrace the new reality. So what exactly has changed? Here are 5 changes in B2B buying behavior you need to know about and how you can deal with each.      

While companies spend billions of dollars on sales training each year, 90% of sales training fails to have an impact after 120 days. It's time for an entirely new way of approaching sales education; an approach that changes the way sales training is conceived, designed, and executed over the long-term. An approach that drives real behavior change and results. Watch our new animated video to learn more.     Related StoriesWhat Sales Metrics Should You Track? - The Essential List [PDF]Sales Team Training that Produces Real ResultsOn-Demand Webinar: 5 Elements of World-Class Sales Training Programs 

Only when you have a good sense of what's going on in your organization can you decide which buttons to push to make the greatest improvements. Even small efforts to track key sales metrics can quickly drive better results. Yet many organizations fail on this account. In their recent benchmark report, Hubspot found that 74% of companies who were falling short of their goals weren't tracking their lead or sales opportunity numbers.1 In our sales consulting work, we've seen literally hundreds of sales metrics—some important, some not so much. Of course, every company is different and no company tracks them all. The list below, however, while deliberately not exhaustive, contains the sales metrics that tend to be important for leaders to track and know. Click to download The Essential List of Sales Metrics PDF.       Related Stories[New White Paper] World-Class Sales Training: How to Build and Implement Your Own Sales UniversityHow to Set Up the Best Sales Training[New Video] Transform Sales Training - Your Sales University