Accelerating Your Sales Career by “Shifting the Burden”
If pressed to offer universal advice for sellers, I think I’d say, “shift the burden.”
Here’s what it could look like when selling, looking for jobs, and working with your manager:
Defending Unique Product Differentiators
Effectively using unique differentiators can be the difference between winning and losing a deal.
Unfortunately, most AEs use them wrong. Here’s why and how to fix:
A unique differentiator is a feature/solution you offer that your competitors do not.
AEs love to bring these up in sales calls:
Time Kills Deals – How To Increase Deal Velocity
As we approach the end of the year you may be worrying about getting deals closed before end of quarter.
One way to increase deal velocity is to stop looking at the “deal cycle” as a period of time.
Instead of “our typical deal cycle is 3-5 months” think, “our typical deal cycle is 5-7 decisions.”
Here are some of the decisions made in a deal cycle:
4 Essential Reports Account Executives Should Use to Work Smarter
Working smarter AND harder guaranteed my success as an Account Executive. Here are the reports I relied on to work smarter:
1) Priority Accounts
Never waste time wondering “what account should I work today?”
Stop Wasting Time Working Mediocre Accounts
When a new AE joins my group, priority number one is helping them understand how to organize, understand, and optimize their territory for sustained success.
The most common mistake I see is putting too much weight on CRM Data: revenue, employee count, and any “Account Score” calculated by sales operations.
How to Find Your ICP
The market downturn means deal cycles are longer and win rates are lower.
One way to reverse this trend is to only spend your time with your true ideal customer profile (ICP).
Here’s how to find the people that will buy like it’s still 2021:
How to bring up pricing + overcome sticker shock in sales
I’m frequently asked if you should bring up pricing early in a deal.
I think you should almost always bring it up – here’s why:
4 Traits the Best Account Executives (AEs) Have
The best AEs I’ve worked with exhibit these traits:
Coachable
High IQ
High EQ
Internal Locus of Control
This edition of Sales Introverts Weekly shares the questions I ask to evaluate these traits, and how AEs can show strength in these areas.
Why Meeting Solution Requirements is a Bad Sign
This week we are looking at why simply meeting your customer’s requirements usually leads to losing.
The situation:
Sellers become excited when their prospect lists their required features and knows their product checks all the boxes. Unfortunately, this is usually a red flag.
“Can you break out your proposal into line-items?”
Ok, I’m going to start this newsletter with a disclaimer: I’m going to get dangerously specific in my recommendation for handling an essential conversation that can arise in negotiations.
Here’s my disclaimer:
This example is built for a SaaS company that offers its product in different “bundled” tiers
This example is made for usage-driven pricing models