Why Buyers Have Lost Their Ability to Reach Decisions Survey today’s Business-to-Business (B2B) salespeople, you will most likely hear rumblings that selling is more arduous, takes more effort, with more drawn out, longer sales cycles than ever before. What happened? Did customer really lose the ability to make decisions? How can this be addressed by […]
Sales Process
Implementing a best practice sales process has a positive effect on win rates, forecast accuracy, and productivity per sales person. This is especially true for companies with expansion strategies. But, a sales process is only as effective as the sales people’s adoption of it.
Is getting your salespeople to change their processes like trying to get a 2-year-old to eat his broccoli? You are not alone.
Even if it’s obvious the current processes are time-consuming, costly, and unproductive, it’s difficult to successfully motivate salespeople to implement new ways of performing.
Throughout my sales career, I had prospects I was certain were going to sign on the dotted line…
And then the deal fell through.
Disappointed and surprised, I moved on, lamenting the loss of that potential client, and the fattened commission that would have come along with it.
After a few of these happenings, I began to analyze each instance, and realized there were signs I missed that these deals were going awry. Over time, I became savvy in recognizing these “clues,” and adept at circumventing the sale from going down the drain.
Typically, there were seven signs the deal was falling apart. Here they are, along with valuable intel on how to save them:
Ever since I was promoted to sales management in the late ‘90s, I’ve been confronted with the measurement of weighted pipeline and forecast methodologies.
Cut Your Time Spent on Forecasting in Half One of the most painful and time intensive tasks as a sales leader is driving an accurate forecast. Leaders spend up to 40% of their time collecting and qualifying the forecast. Lengthy labour intensive Friday forecast calls, reps complaining about wasted time, frustration on poor deal qualification […]
When I first started out as a sales manager, I had a pretty good close rate – with one record quarter after another.
Until one devastating quarter… where almost 50% of my team’s deals either slipped or were lost for good.
It crushed us.
We couldn’t make any sense of it. After all, we hadn’t done anything different.
I spent days trying to find out what went wrong… until my manager pulled me aside and asked me one of the most eye-opening questions of my career:
Rizan, in all the deals that slipped, how many of them did you meet the Economic Buyer?
The answer was clear:
After a quick check I was able to find a direct link between meeting the Economic Buyer and whether we won or lost the deal.
You may have a killer pain, a strong champion, and powerful metrics. But if the the EB isn’t on your side, there’s a big chance your deal won’t close.
In today’s article, we cover:
Today, we’re onto Part 4 of our series on How to Effectively Close More Deals.
So far, we’ve covered pain & implication, generating customer rapport and building up a sales champion.
The next step is the glue that binds your whole sales campaign together. It’s what justifies the purchase and convinces the Economic Buyer sign on the dotted line.
That’s right, I’m talking about Metrics.
Here’s an in-depth look at what they are, how they will help you close more deals, and why you never want to miss out on collecting them…
In our post, Identifying the Real Pain, we talked about what qualifies as ‘real,’ deal-closing pain points and what doesn’t.
We received great replies from our readers stating that customers many times don’t disclose this kind of information so easily.
Well, it’s not an easy task.
If you want to find pain points, you need to uncover them – inch by inch – and earn the right to learn about your customer’s pain.
And the key to developing customer rapport…
Here’s how the MEDDIC sales qualification process can help you hit a 90% close rate by keeping your focused on the fundamentals of a deal.
In 1973, UCLA basketball Coach John Wooden created sports history.
That was the year he became the first coach in any sport to win 7 national championships in a row.
He ended up leading his team to win a total of 10 championships in a 12-year period, with an unparalleled 88-game winning streak.
So what was it that set him apart from every other coach that came before (and after) him?
One simple thing:
This week we had the pleasure of interviewing Jack Napoli, the ‘Godfather’ of the MEDDIC sales process:
For those of you who aren’t familiar, MEDDIC is one of the most effective sales methodologies I’ve ever come across for qualifying deals thoroughly.
In fact, Jack and MEDDIC co-creator Dick Dunkel used it while at PTC to more than triple sales from $300 million to $1 billion in just four years. Personally speaking, MEDDIC helped me increase my close rate to over 90% and increase my team’s sales 60% year on year.
Today, MEDDIC is used by fast-growing startups as well as large corporations such as EMC, RSA, BMC and more.
Check out the interview here:
