Sales Tips

A week of hectic travel leaves you tired and frustrated.  Here are three steps to get organized and ensure success on your next sales trip: 1. Plan Ahead In order to get ahead of the competition, you need to be efficient.  By creating optimal routes and sticking to them, you'll steer clear of stressful situations during the week.  Cutting your driving by 20% means crushing your quota while everyone else is still on the road.  And since you can store your routes in an iCal, Outlook, or Google calendar, you'll know exactly what's on tap every day of the trip. 2. Track your Progress You shouldn't count…

As a field sales rep, you’re well experienced in the art of conversation. Sales is the act of bringing someone over to your side, and conversation is the best way to do that. A solid conversation creates action - it means a monthly quota met, a year-end bonus, and a happy customer. In a sense, every conversation is selling something; an opinion, suggestion, story, or idea. Salespeople require the skills to make this happen more than anyone. But outside of being charming and putting customers at ease, there are ways you can subtly sell more than you ever thought possible…

What type of business are you? The sales process for a B2B company is different than a consumer-facing business. Leads are gathered differently, there are more decision makers, and a distinct form of product knowledge is required for each. Understanding what type of business you are is the first step to becoming a better business. Your sales process defines how you sell your product to your customers. Your sales process will generally follow this format:   Lead Generation – Finding your customers, or helping them find you. This might be accomplished through cold calling, advertisements, inbound marketing, or other forms of lead…

I hypothesize that maps become fancier in response to the need people had for them. This seems simple enough, but a while ago, it was unclear to my simple mind what came first: the demand for a more encompassing map software or the map software itself? If we take a brief look at the history of maps, we can discover hundreds of years of mapmaking for the sake of convenience. People made maps for commerce, for astrology and agriculture, to map out where God was blowing his mighty winds (this one is my favorite actually).