Planning is So Boring (said the broke salesperson)

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Until you have clarity on your daily and weekly activities, generated as a result of a defined sales plan, you’re just winging it. And, you’re wasting precious hours every week that could be used to prospect, build your funnel, and create more customer contact. If you think about it, that may be the biggest loss in failing to plan – the time you lose as a result of indecision or filling time while you wait for the next customer emergency. But not to worry. Your competitors are probably in the same boat. You hope.

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Customers Only Care About Price (Until They Buy)

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Customers clearly care about a lot of other things other than price. In addition delivery and service and follow-up, they also care about support, and training, an innovation, and efficiency, and a dozen other things. But, for some reason, you can’t get them to focus on those things – not until they’ve beaten you up for a better price. The fact is, you will never get to the top of the sales leaderboard by cutting your prices. And until you learn how to avoid the commodity trap, you are pretty much screwed.

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Why Do You Never Seem to Have Enough Time?

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Salespeople never seem to have enough time. Which is interesting, because time is arguably the most important asset that any salesperson has. In fact, the real currency that salespeople trade in is not products and services, it’s time and ideas. The less time a salesperson spends in front of potential customers, the more challenging it is to develop new business and grow revenue; and the fewer productive ideas a salesperson has to offer customers, the more difficult it is to win acquire new customers.

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The REAL Problem with Customer Objections

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Handling customer objections can be a challenge. But the REAL problem is trying to figure out the difference between a genuine objection – a legitimate barrier – and the kind of objection that’s designed to communicate something entirely different: “I’m really not interested, but I don’t want to come right out and say so.” Been there?

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