You're at an industry event mulling over which cheese will go best with which crackers at the buffet. The person next to you introduces himself. You introduce yourself. Then he says: "So tell me, what do you do?" The challenge is to communicate the key elements of your value. When we work with our clients to teach them how to sell, we tend to focus on helping them learn the right things to do, such as you’ll find in our article 6 Building Blocks for Communicating Your Value Proposition. Knowing the right thing to do will help you get on the right track. However, even those on the right track can get derailed by common mistakes. It’s often just as helpful to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. Here, then, are the most common mistakes we see people making when trying to answer the question, "What do you do?" and ideas for how to avoid them...      

In our white paper Why Strategic Account Management Fails, we noted that high performers in strategic account management were significantly less likely to face 16 of 19 common challenges in strategic account management. We didn’t, however, have space to go into much detail in this specific area. Since publishing the white paper, we’ve been asked quite a bit for more detail on the specific challenges faced by companies that engage in formal strategic account management, and the differences between high performers and average / below-average performers. Though access to the full Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management is reserved for one-on-one interactions and for our work with clients, we are happy to share this more in-depth look at some of the challenges that stood out to us...      

"It’s impossible to get serious face time with senior executives." "Even getting 15 minutes with a senior executive can take 15 months." I hear things like this all the time from professionals, sellers, and other business leaders who want to get more time with decision makers, but haven’t yet cracked the code. Let’s start by setting a few things straight: 1.    It’s not impossible to get serious face time with senior executives. 2.    Getting serious face time with senior executives doesn’t need to take forever. 3.    The code is crackable. It’s a common misconception that senior executives don’t have time. Based on extensive research in the area, I’m prepared to reveal a startling fact...      

What is the #1 challenge or issue you face when it comes to growing sales for your business? When I recently reached out to my network and asked that same question, 75% mentioned sales prospecting as their #1 challenge. The problem isn’t that people don’t know what to do; it’s that what they’ve always done no longer works. Want proof? Think about the last time you met an actual decision maker at a networking event, and that conversation led to a sale. How about from a cold call? Trade show? Advertisement? The simple truth is this: if you do what everybody else is doing, you’ll get the same results everybody else is getting. Which, in a world where prospects are increasingly turning off their phone and turning on their spam filters, isn’t much. So, if you want to stand out (and get more meetings), here are five sales prospecting techniques you’ve probably never tried (but should).      

All the strategies. All the meetings. All the planning. All the effort you put in to maximizing your sales to existing accounts will be for naught if you don’t first talk about, and then do something about, this hidden killer of account growth. Your people don’t trust each other. We don’t mean everyone thinks the guys down the hall are all lying, cheating, sniveling Salty Sams. It’s often more subtle: Your account leaders don’t know enough about the other areas of your business and how they operate to trust them with their most important relationships. Your account leaders don’t know enough about what the other areas can help clients achieve to believe that their clients will be thrilled if they buy it. Your account leaders have been burned in the past by bringing other people (or, perhaps, specific people) in, so, whether consciously or not, they avoid broadening the conversation. Then again, it could be Saltysamism. It could be they doubt each other’s competence. Or that the product they sell isn’t so great. It could be a host of issues.      

See an article about differentiation and it’s likely to be about marketing. Differentiation often starts with marketing, but it’s in the selling process that it truly comes alive. Here at RAIN Group, we recently analyzed just over 700 business-to-business sales made to buyers who represent $3.1 billion in annual purchases from industries with complex sales. The purpose of the research was to find out what sales winners do differently in the selling process compared to the sellers that didn’t win, but who came in second place. One area we studied was the buyers’ perceptions of what they believe led them to buy from the winners. Overall, we studied 42 factors, three of which focused on differentiation. They were: Overall value from the company was superior to other options. Company offers products and services that are superior to other options. Seller differentiated their products and services from the other available options. Not only did these differentiation factors score near the top of the list, they dominated it. In fact, these three factors were in the top four! Not only is differentiation in the selling process helpful, but it’s of the utmost importance if a seller wants to win.      

One of the greatest difficulties in professional services sales is helping potential clients understand what outcomes they will achieve when they work with you. Creating a picture of what outcomes are possible with the solution you present is imperative for two reasons. First, prospects need to be convinced of the outcome and that you can achieve it or they likely will not purchase. Second, if they do not fully understand what you are able to do for them, they cannot communicate it to the rest of the influencers in their organization and your sale may get stuck in endless internal discussions. Helping prospects to understand the value of the services you provide is an exercise in teaching and learning. Prospects need to understand what will be different for them and their company if they purchase your services versus if they don’t, or if they purchase services from a competitor. In the end, prospects are not interested in buying your services; they are interested in what your services will get them.      

Broad, open ended-sales questions are great for helping us to find out what’s going on in our prospects’ and clients’ worlds. They help us connect with buyers personally, understand their needs, understand what’s important to them, and help them create better futures for themselves. Following are 21 open-ended sales questions you can ask that will help you round out the picture of your clients' needs. These questions are broken down into four groupings within the RAIN SellingSM Framework: Rapport Aspirations and Afflictions Impact New Reality One thing to note about open-ended sales questions: they don’t need to be complex. Often the basics are all you need.      

Want to make more sales? Start by having better conversations. Think about it. You spent months chasing a senior decision maker or prospect, making calls, and sending e-mails, and they finally agreed to sit down with you. You invested significant amounts of time, effort, energy and—sometimes considerable—resources to win them over. And now you find yourself in a room with a senior executive. Now what? In this video, I explain my five-step process for ensuring you have great sales meetings that are virtually guaranteed to lead to a next meeting.      

After many months of significant effort, we launched What Sales Winners Do Differently this week. This report reveals data and insight from our in-depth sales research on what sellers do to win sales opportunities. The results are both surprising and fascinating. Where selling was just a few years ago, where it is today, and where it’s going: these are pretty hot, and hotly debated, topics. Quite a few people, most notably the authors of The Challenger Sale, have declared the death of solution selling. You know an idea has gained mainstream credence when the Harvard Business Review publishes an article that takes a firm position on it. In this case, the article in the July-August 2012 issue was titled "The End of Solution Sales." No hedging in that title. Story over. The end. We agree that sales is changing, but the question is how. When we started this research, our goal was to find out what’s currently working in sales. Is solution selling really dead? If so, what should replace it? If not, since we know selling is changing, what do sellers need to do differently in order to find themselves in the winner’s circle more often?