Why does one sales team win a customer’s business, while another sales team finishes in second place? According to research announced in this blog post, New Sales Research: What Sales Winners Do Differently, three simple selling behaviors separate winning sales teams from their competition.
For some B2B sellers and marketers, the summer slump is just a myth. But no matter what the season, all of us experience a slowdown every now and again. Here are some smart tips we've come across on the subject of beating a sales or marketing slowdown (summertime or otherwise) in the B2B space.
Last week I spoke with Ken Powell, who’s been leading a sales transformation at SunGard in his role as VP of Global Sales Enablement. (He was also a speaker this week at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston.)
There are a couple of categories of value dimensions that will often be challenged by a prospect when you are building an ROI-based business case, and labor savings is at the top of that list. Labor savings tend to be tough to get customer buy-in for a number of reasons:
- Labor Savings are often spread across many people’s time and thus are considered soft or indirect benefits without real economic impact
- In order to capture the labor savings, the company often needs to take some action (reduce headcount, avoid hiring more workers, or reallocate employees to other value-added activities)
- Often the people that you are dealing with when building the business case are the people that will be impacted by the actions required (e.g., selling a technology solution to the IT department that reduces IT headcount may be difficult)
- Companies have been promised productivity gains many times, but rarely have they seen the results.
