Having spent two decades in the sales training and consulting world, I get asked all the time what I think about this or that sales approach or book. When I do, it tends to make for productive discussion and learning. Importantly, it helps people decide what’s right for them when it comes to selling. Until now, I’ve never been asked about the same approach and book on a regular basis. That approach and book is The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. And now that we’ve published RAIN Group’s major research study, What Sales Winners Do Differently, we’re getting asked even more often. Since we get asked often—and since it’s getting a bit old copying and pasting the same emails to clients and colleagues—we thought we’d open up the discussion to everyone...      

Eighty percent of success is showing up. - Woody Allen Woody Allen’s advice is pretty sound for salespeople as well, assuming you show up prepared. We acknowledge that sometimes you do just show up (or—hallelujah—a prospect calls you out of the blue) and you haven't done any preparation for the sales call. It's reasonable to suggest that, on occasion, sales calls are appropriately deemed 'exploratory discussions'; the kind of discussion in which we just talk and 'see where it goes.' Take this approach in most business development situations, however, and you'll lose more than your share of sales that you should have won. Interestingly, whether you have a two-thousand- or two-million-dollar price point, to increase your odds of winning new clients, you still need to do the same basic planning and know the same essential information before your sales calls. Here are six sales call planning questions you can answer for yourself before every sales call that will help prepare you for business development success...      

Don't show your clients a windy, roundabout path to their goals. Make it easy. Like a Poor Marksman You Keep…Missing…The Target! - Admiral James T. Kirk If you don't know your destination, any road will get you there. When prospects ask for a formal proposal, they are telling you their desired destination: a business relationship with you. And they're asking you to answer the question, "What road do we take to get there?" Since it's your job to give directions, you want to tell them the straightest, shortest, and easiest route. After all, you don't want them to get lost along the way, or so tired on the path that they give up before they get to the end. Why is it, then, that so many new business proposals that cross my desk take the long and winding road? They start off in the wrong direction, take side-roads that lead nowhere, and take forever to get where they're going. It's no wonder the success rate of these proposals is so low.      

"Your fees are too high; can you do it for less?" In the highly competitive marketplace we hear dreaded phrases like this all of the time. The easy thing to do is to offer a discount, but that cuts into your profit margins and sets a precedent for the future. You don’t want to become a victim of discounting gone wrong. So what do you do when clients push back on your fees? The glib answer is: focus on your value. It's trite, but true. If it's worth it to the client they'll pay for it. But when faced with price pushback, many are at a loss for what to do at that moment.      

Like King Midas, as I was told, everything he touched turned to gold. - Joseph Simmons and Daryl McDaniels "If I could just get a meeting with my target prospects I am certain I could close five (or six or eight) out of every ten." How many of you think the same thing? You know that when you get in front of the prospect you can wow them. Every time a lead comes into the firm and you go on the sales meeting, it's a slam dunk. Made-in-the-shade. Can of corn. You know you'll get the gig. Let's assume you set a meeting with someone you believe will be a good prospect. It's not from a referral - they neither know you nor have they heard of you beforehand. Thus there is no transferred trust as when you are referred in. It's also not from a client who's sought you out, thus there's no hot need. You targeted them, and you asked them for a meeting. You secure the meeting and drive off to the prospect as confident as ever only to sit down across the table from a buyer with crossed arms asking, "Who are you again, and what are you trying to sell me?" You leave with a sinking feeling; you've wasted your time.      

If you really do put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price. - Anonymous How many of us, as professional service providers, have heard from prospects, "Your fees are too high," "Someone else will do it for less," or "I don't see why I have to pay all that money just to have you do an audit, write a brief, create a marketing plan, etc.?" And, more important, how many resist the urge to simply lower our fees to get the work? The answer: all of us and few of us. The problem with lowering our fees for a particular piece of work is that we forever have established our value as that lower amount. As our anonymous friend said, if we ourselves put a low value on our work, certainly no one else is going to suggest our value is any higher. Why do so many of us fall victim to these worst tendencies? To answer this, we first have to look at objections in general and how they fit into the selling process for professional services...      

Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013 Time: 2 p.m. ET Duration: 45 minutes Presenters: Mike Schultz, President, RAIN Group Author, Rainmaking Conversations Jill Konrath, Sales Strategist Author, SNAP Selling & Selling to Big Companies You’ve likely been taught that in order to win the sale, you need to listen to your prospects’ needs and present compelling, effective solutions. But there’s a problem—everyone else has been taught the same thing. In today’s competitive sales landscape, you must take an additional step if you want to stand out from the crowd: you must collaborate. If you treat your prospects as partners, and work closely with them to find the best solutions to their problems, your success rate will be much, much higher. In this fast-paced and engaging session, RAIN Group President Mike Schultz and sales expert Jill Konrath will discuss why collaboration is so essential to your sales efforts and how you can use it to separate yourself from your competition. Click here to register (limited seats available).      

Most people think of prospecting as reaching out to people they don’t know, with an over-the-top approach, to interest them in buying something they’re not thinking about. This isn’t the only way to generate more leads. Prospecting isn’t just a cold activity, and you don’t need a sledgehammer approach to make it work. Key accounts are typically huge, untapped opportunities for more business, but the outreach tends to look very different. To generate more leads with key accounts, sellers often use the same tactics they do when cold prospecting. It’s not called "key account sales" just to use fancy words. It’s different. If you’re selling to a key account, you know them already. And they know you. You’re important to each other. You’ve built trust. That’s a very strong platform. One you should be careful to protect. At the same time, most realize they can and should be doing more work with their key accounts. Since no one else is going to make sure the client receives maximum business value from their relationship with your company, you must be proactive to make it happen.      

In this post we noted we often get questions about The Challenger Sale. Perhaps the most common question we get is, "What do you think of the five seller profiles?" The five seller profiles, as defined by the authors of The Challenger Sale in "Selling Is Not About Relationships," a Harvard Business Review blog post, are as follows. We list them in order by what they found in their study to be least to most likely to be a top performer in sales: Relationship Builders Reactive Problem Solvers Hard Workers Lone Wolves Challengers So here you are—our thoughts on the five seller profiles in The Challenger Sale...      

For our What Sales Winners Do Differently research, we studied over 700 major purchases from buyers who represented $3.1 billion dollars in annual purchasing power. One question we wanted to answer was, "Is it the company and offerings that make the biggest difference in the buyer’s purchase decision, or is it the seller and how they sell?" Guess what: it’s the seller and how they sell that most separates the winners of the sales from the rest. The following list reveals what buyers say are the top 10 areas where sellers who win outperform those who come in second place...