Signals from the Field

Sales training without customized skill practice and ongoing follow up is like getting your knee replaced and ignoring post-surgery physical therapy. It is never quite the same. We’ve all experienced it before – well not the knee surgery part. You attend a one or two-day sales training seminar and at the end you feel like you can conquer the world. You feel like a selling beast. In the training and development industry, we call this feeling the “post training high”.

The biggest challenge facing brands online is the ability to stand out from the crowd. Put simply, it’s become a very crowded and very competitive space. Winning online today is less about being the most technical savvy and more about understanding your customer journey. To maximize your chance for success in 2015, consider these five important trends.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The term "buyer's journey" describes the research process that a lead, or potential buyer, goes through before becoming a customer. There are three distinct stages in the journey: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. As marketers, we always want to try to cater our messaging and strategies to prospects based on their place within the buyer’s journey.

Whether in life or business, experiencing failure often provides invaluable lessons. Today, I intend to help you bypass that hardship and failure by sharing four important online marketing lessons we’ve seen businesses learn the hard way.

Lessons from the Front Line: The top 5 useful metrics to Create Structure and Discipline in Sales

The internet has changed the lives of professional salespeople in a big way. Recent reports suggest more than 70% of the buying journey is done anonymously online. Combine that with more competition and information that is so easily accessible for the buyer, buyers are far more empowered and educated than they were only a few years ago.

Nearly every time you read about the top traits of successful salespeople you’ll find a section about qualifying buyers. In sales, the buyer is not the only one who should be making a decision. The salesperson has to decide how much time and energy to pursue the buyer. Too much time invested in an unqualified buyer prevents the salesperson from working with the right buyers to achieve his goals.

Following are 10 fun and interesting facts about sales and selling performance. If you feel a little twinge when you read some of them because they might be a development opportunity for you, I’ve included some recommendations about how to improve. Going one step further, I've included links to previous articles/posts related to some of the topics.

Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest nor the most intelligent of the species that survives, but the ones most responsive to change”. How this applies to you is determined by many factors. But with the marketplace becoming ever more competitive and buyers’ attitudes influenced by so many new and changing factors, successful salespeople and businesses need to focus on three important factors to ensure they adapt and survive.