Tag Archives for " Sales Managers "

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??

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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.

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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…

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How to (Profitably) Manage Your Time

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Given how ridiculously easy it is to prove the value of time, salespeople are incredibly cavalier about giving it away. Trust me when I tell you that the average salesperson easily gives away 3-5 hours per week. In many cases, the number is as high as 8 hours per week. Every week. But what if you had that time back and you used it to do just one thing: develop new opportunities? Is there a possibility your results would change in the next three months?

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