Tag Archives for " Sales "

Why Bother With the Little Things?

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Most people tend to handle the big things. Often, it’s the little things that create all the problems. The details. The stuff that falls through the cracks. The things you think aren’t that important. In some cases, you may even consider them to be beneath you. But it’s the little things that distinguish the average player from the exceptional player. It is the little things, for example, that make the difference between an average customer experience and a HOLY-CRAP-THAT-WAS-AMAZING customer experience.

Continue reading

To BANT or Not to BANT?

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

If you’re new to sales, BANT is a method for “qualifying” sales opportunities that includes four areas – Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. The idea is that these are four critical qualification factors that should be determined rather early in the sales process to ensure a salesperson isn’t 1) wasting time, 2) trying to sell the wrong person, or 3) trying to proceed without an understanding of the prospect’s actual needs. But sales guru, Jim Keenan, thinks it’s a joke. Is he right??

Continue reading

Sales Advice You will Absolutely HATE

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Let’s quit messing around and get down to it. There is one reason – and one reason only – that you don’t hit your number. One. Reason. Only. You just don’t have enough opportunities in your pipeline. PERIOD. I don’t care if you close an abysmal 1-out-of-10 deals. I don’t care if your average deal size is 25 percent lower than everyone else. Regardless of your win rate and deal size, if you put enough deals in the hopper, you WILL hit your number.

Continue reading

The Insanity of Sales Managers

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Unfortunately, the whole concept of insanity seems to be lost on many sales managers. Salespeople will produce the same mediocre results over and over, but never change a single thing they are doing. In many cases, they resist any kind of change, insisting that what they do actually works! The problem, they say, is a sluggish economy, or a product that lacks key features, or a marketing initiative that falls short, or a set of circumstances that is working against them. Anything, of course, except what they are doing. Over and over and over…

Continue reading