May 13th, 2013
Viewing Posts for: Dario Priolo
How to Update Sales Talent Profiles without Tanking Your Business
Tinkering with your profile of a successful sales rep is risky business, but what can you do when you know the talent that got you where you are today won’t get you where you need to go in the future? For example, maybe you need to transition from a product to a solution-led sale, manage accounts more strategically, or take a more assertive insight-led sales approach. Your business is constantly changing, and you probably have good reason to redefine the attributes of your future top performer. How can you make this transition to minimize risk and disruption?
May 10th, 2013
No More Playing Around: The Pros and Cons of Gamification
The concept and practice of engaging people for business through games is not new. Marketing experts point to airline frequent flyer mile programs as an early form of gamification aimed at consumers. As for employees, pilots practicing and honing their skills using flight simulators is a good example of how training can be gamified.
We live in an age where we are overwhelmed with information. However, changing buyer behavior requires sellers to bring tailored insight to the table to build awareness and credibility and begin to shape the buyer’s concept of what they need and why they need it sooner rather than later.
May 3rd, 2013
My Top 25 List of Tools for Sales People
My Top 25 List of Tools for Sales People
When you think of typical tools for sales people, CRM software and services, such as Salesforce.com, likely come to mind. While CRM is certainly an important aspect of a salesperson’s job, it’s by no means the end-all-be-all. In order to effectively prospect and sell, sales people and managers can and should take advantage of a host of tools and applications to guide their activities and help their efforts.
Selling with Insights: The Why and How of Approaching Informed Buyers with Insight
In our previous blog post, we discussed four changes in buyer behavior driving four challenges for sellers. These were:
Online Perception Bias Reputation Bias Solution Bias Procurement Process Bias
In this article, we’ll share some ideas for overcoming those challenges with insight.
How to Approach Informed Buyers
Buyers are doing their research, and traditional sellers are getting left behind. It is tempting to throw your hands up in defeat and simply respond reactively to the opportunities your customers give you. This approach puts too much of your fate in the hands of your marketing team and can drive intense price competition. Sellers need to engage informed buyers differently. To avoid commoditization, rather than simply respond, sellers must create and shape opportunities.
Shaping opportunities requires the seller to change the way the customer thinks about their needs or a solution to the seller’s advantage. It is most applicable when the customer is far along in their buying cycle and has already formed a concept for what they want or need. Shaping the opportunity requires the sales rep to disrupt the customer’s thinking so that they take a few steps back and reconsider the need or solution. Through building trust and credibility, and through sharing relevant insight based on credible research or experience, the seller challenges the » Continue Reading.
April 24th, 2013
4 Changes in Buyer Behavior Driving 4 New Challenges for Sellers
4 Changes in Buyer Behavior Driving 4 New Challenges for Sellers
Think about how you would have purchased a car 20 years ago. You would walk onto a dealer’s car lot, kick a few tires, and then be swarmed by sharks pushing you to take a test drive. You might have been armed with a copy of Consumer Reports, Car and Driver or Auto Trader, but those publications only went so deep. For example, if you wanted a review on a dealership’s service department, there was no Yelp available. Now think about how you would buy a car today. As a consumer, would you want to turn the clock back to the 1980’s? Probably not!
April 22nd, 2013
Leveraging Trigger Events to Take the Pain out of Prospecting
Leveraging Trigger Events to Take the Pain out of Prospecting
In a recent post, I talked about ways to find ideal prospects. Once you’ve identified the profile of your likely buyers, you could start cold calling them to gauge interest and get them on your mailing lists, but that takes time and promises little yield. A more effective approach is to know situations or circumstances that precipitate buying among your current clients and then target ideal prospects in similar straits.
April 19th, 2013
A Simple Guide for Defining Your Ideal Prospects and Leveraging LinkedIn to Find More
A Simple Guide for Defining Your Ideal Prospects and Leveraging LinkedIn to Find More
Growing your pool of potential customers begins with defining the profile of your ideal prospect. This activity should be done collaboratively between sales and marketing. Start by looking back at opportunities that you won over the past two or three years and recreate the path or circumstances that led a prospect from contact to lead to opportunity. Drill down to determine the types of individuals and organizations, as well as the situations or issues they faced that motivated them to talk to you.
April 15th, 2013
Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts – Part 2
Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts
In the first part of this article, we introduced the notion that value not communicated is value not perceived and three basic steps to ensure that the right people in your account understand your contribution:
April 12th, 2013
Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts, Part 1
Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts (Part 1)
Protecting and growing strategic accounts requires that you constantly look for ways to create value for your customer. However, creating value won’t mean much if it goes unrecognized. Yes, you need to help your customer achieve their desired outcomes, and you must do so in a way that creates a positive customer experience. But, you also need to invest the time and effort to ensure that the right people in your account understand your contribution. Don’t take this for granted, and don’t assume. Value not communicated is value not perceived.
April 4th, 2013
Improving Executive Prospecting Effectiveness by Understanding Executive Prospect Behavior
Improving Executive Prospecting Effectiveness by Understanding Executive Prospect Behavior
We all know that traditional prospecting today is very difficult. How many professionals do you know have the time and interest to willingly pick up the phone and engage in an unsolicited conversation? What executive cheerily works their way through their inbox responding thoughtfully to every e-mail? Sure, people pick up the phone and reply to e-mails, but there’s a triage method to when and how they respond.
2013 Social Media in Sales Survey: What’s Being Used and With What Success?
Social media sites have become a pervasive part of our society, in both our personal and professional lives. It’s nearly impossible to remain truly disconnected and off the grid.
According to Facebook, there were more than a billion active users of the social networking platform in December 2012. (For context, if recent estimates are close, there are now over seven billion people on the planet.) Granted, those Facebook accounts are both individual and organizational, but the keyword in the stat isn’t the number as much as the word “active.”
March 11th, 2013
Essential Social Media Issues Companies in Financial Services and Regulated Industries Must Consider
Few people need to be convinced of the prevalence of social media and the opportunity it presents to connect with and open a dialogue with friends — or in the case of businesses, buyers and influencers. What is less certain, however, is how some industries — especially those that are strictly regulated — can go about adopting and deploying a social media strategy.
March 8th, 2013
When Business Processes Change, Minimize the Impact on Sales
When Business Processes Change, Minimize the Impact on Sales
Businesses are complex and require constant attention to remain competitive, profitable, and productive. That quest often leads to change, which can be targeted to specific parts of an organization or be company-wide.
Any change will likely be disruptive, but that’s to be expected and hopefully minimized. The greater concern comes when companies introduce changes to one part of the business without fully exploring the impact on other areas, including sales.
An Expert’s Perspective on Lead Generation and Executive Appointment Setting
A recent study by CSO Insights revealed that capturing new accounts is the top objective for sales leaders over the next 12 months. Upon reading this, I thought back on one of the best presentations that I ever attended on the topic of lead generation and executive appointment setting. Ironically, it was at the 2011 Inbound Marketing Summit. I’ve been a practitioner of content marketing and inbound lead generation for years, but I’ve always been very skeptical of the idea that outbound prospecting is dead. We all know how annoying it can be to get stalked by overly aggressive sales reps that have no clue about what you really need. However, there has to be some middle ground.
March 1st, 2013
12 Simple Social Media Selling Activities to Help Your Sales Reps Drive New Business and Grow Key Accounts
12 Simple Social Media Selling Activities to Help Your Sales Reps Drive New Business and Grow Key Accounts
We recently conducted an extensive survey of over 500 sales reps to learn more about their social media selling practices and their perceived effectiveness. The results so far, which we are still in the process of analyzing and which we’ll release in early March, have been shocking. In spite of all the hype over social media and social media selling, organizations and sales reps are really struggling to deliver value from social media selling activities. Allow us to share some quick wins to help you or your sales reps get on track to executing the basics well. Even if you’re a technology laggard and a latecomer to the social media game, below are 12 easy, but very high-impact social media activities to support new business development and strategic account management activities.
February 25th, 2013
How Gamification of Sales Training Boosts Rep Engagement and Increases Ability to Recall
How Gamification of Sales Training Boosts Rep Engagement and Increases Ability to Recall - (Part 3 of 3)
- Today’s BLOG is written by Richardson’s partner, Duncan Lennox, CEO of Qstream
In my previous two posts, I presented the problem of sales reps falling victim to The Forgetting Curve and the solution of using a tool such as Richardson’s QuickCheckTM as a means to help sales reps commit what they’ve learned in training to their long-term memory. Let’s take a closer look at how it works and some of the benefits of using the QuickCheckTM after training your reps.
February 21st, 2013
Spacing, Testing, and Feedback: Essential Ingredients to Sustain Sales Training Impact
Spacing, Testing, and Feedback: Essential Ingredients to Sustain Sales Training Impact – (Part 2 of 3)
- Today’s BLOG is written by Richardson’s partner, Duncan Lennox, CEO of Qstream
When you invest in training your sales reps, you expect them to learn the new information, use the new skills, and adopt the new behaviors. However, as I outlined in my previous post, most people quickly forget what they learn in a matter of days. How, then, can you improve your sales reps’ ability to recall and, as a result, also improve the ROI of your sales training and move closer to the goals you set out to achieve through the training?
February 18th, 2013
Help Your Sales Reps Move from “The Forgetting Curve” to “Total Recall”
Help Your Sales Reps Move from “The Forgetting Curve” to “Total Recall” (Part 1 of 3)
- Today’s BLOG is written by Richardson’s partner, Duncan Lennox, CEO of Qstream
How long until your sales reps forget what they learned at your sales kick-off meeting and training events?
Most people can sing along to their favorite songs from their youth without even thinking about it yet still forget information they read, heard, or learned after just a few days. Knowing that the ability to recall is limited, why then do companies still structure training and learning programs in a manner that takes sales reps offline for a period of time, immerses them deep in new ideas and behaviors, and then send them back out into the field expecting that it all sunk in and is being applied without fail?
February 15th, 2013
A Few Simple Questions and Practical Ideas to Exterminate Sales Forecasting Gremlins
A Few Simple Questions and Practical Ideas to Exterminate Sales Forecasting Gremlins
According to CSO Insights, sales forecasting accuracy hit an all-time low of 46% in 2012. Just about every business and industry experiences peaks and valleys in their sales cycles, but, even with large investments in sales and marketing automation technology, the problem is getting worse and not better. Did you just throw good money after bad in hopes of achieving sales forecasting nirvana? What on earth is going on?
About Richardson
Richardson: Sales Training & Strategy Execution
Richardson helps leaders prepare their organization to execute sales strategies and achieve business objectives.
We have the expertise and resources to help you scale your initiative quickly and confidently across your entire sales force and supporting functions. With you, we establish sales best practices, evaluate talent, build capability and consistency through world class training, and sustain necessary change. We ensure your solution reflects your unique culture and values, which drives rapid adoption and lasting results.
Richardson’s Selling with Insights™
Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ training program teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to present insights, challenge the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. Click here to learn more!
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Dario F. Priolo
Chief Strategy Officer
Even a great sales strategy will fail without effective execution. It is our mission to provide you with insight and best practices for executing your sales strategy and bringing your sales vision to life. We want to help you understand what you need to know and what you need to do to be successful.
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