The Sales Expeditor

It’s campaign season and the candidates are jockeying for position and advantage. Imagine getting up every day, I mean seven days a week and putting in sixteen-hour days. Can you see yourself doing this for six, nine, twelve or eighteen months without stopping? Assuming you win you must then maintain this same level of commitment for one or maybe two terms.

The everyday experience of a Sales Leader gives you all the coaching scenarios you need. The challenge is to recognize them.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Virginia published in the Journal of Child Development shows that teens that argue with their parents deal with peer pressure in more healthy ways. Take a look at this article from the NPR health Blog. Specifically the study finds that teens that argued in appropriate ways were far less susceptible to substance use.

There are hundreds of books and articles on planning for a sales call.

Getting in front of prospects is hard. Once you get there, making the meeting stick has an exponential impact on the size and quality of the pipeline.  Today we are going to discuss Traction. Traction is the percentage of first meetings that progress from Suspect to Prospect. It's an important KPI for Sales Leaders to track because it demonstrates an individual’s ability to capitalize on a first conversation. Without the ability to catch the attention of their suspects the salesperson will continue to struggle to fill their pipeline with quality opportunities

Dave Kurlan’s recent post on the movie Moneyball re-defined some sales Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). 

The following is a guest post from Preston Bowman the President and Lead Marketing Consultant at Stone Creek Consulting a marketing firm based in Olathe, Kansas. He's a leading marketing consultant and specializes in inbound marketing services and social media. Preston is a client of Kurlan & Associates so we asked him to write a partner post to Carole Mahoney's recent post about how salespeople use twitter over on Frank's Blog. Enjoy.  

I was asked to join a call today by one of my colleagues. His thinking was I have greater industry experience and this would help demonstrate our value more quickly. After the introduction I asked a couple questions using “jargon” from the industry. As a result the prospect opened up, became less resistance and began to trust us.

Most people see sales as less than a profession. It’s for people who have the gift of gab, are good at building relationships and effective presenters.

Independent representatives, channel partners, distributors and on-staff technical resources have one thing in common, they have great leverage when it comes to killing a sale. That’s right your most valuable resources may well be your worse nightmare.