Sales Training Insights

In the blog post 'Are Your Sales Techniques 100 Years Old?' we demonstrated that common sales practices like - features, advantages and benefits, objection handling, closing skills, and open and closed questions - were all the rage in sales training classes of 1914!

This article is available in: Podcast, Video and Slideshare formats. Further resources are available free in our learning management system. Registration required. In my sales training classes I play a game with the delegates. I list nine contemporary sales practices and ask them when they were ... Continue reading →

I always start my sales training courses by finding out what the delegates want to achieve. Just recently I was holding an introductory sales training course and the delegates all confirmed that they wanted to lose the 'embarrassment' of selling.

If you could close your deals three times faster, you could potentially sell three times as much. Or spend more time down the pub. The choice is yours. So how do we do that? Here we have four opportunities for you to shorten the sales cycle.... Continue reading →

In order to out sell the competition you need better products, right? Wrong. OK, let's be clear, you need to be in the ball park. The following advice will not work with a substandard offering, I'm not trying to turn you into a magician.

This article is also available in podcast, video and slideshare formats. All sales people know that there's always a cheaper supplier. But most sales people still allow buyers to beat them up with the cheaper alternative. Like this: the buyer says, "Look, I just haven't got the budget that you're asking for.

Also available on Podcast and Slideshare. I often get brought in by companies to look at why individual deals are not closing. One of the methods that I use to decode what is happening, so I can help to find a solution, is by looking at the sale through the lens of the buying cycle, proposed by Neil Rackham.

Some great feedback from the Commercial Directors at WorldPay whose teams attended the Salestrong Insight Selling™ Sales Training Course over the last two weeks. Alison Baker, (Regional Director) anticipates that the sales skills course has given them the capability to access to ... Continue reading →

Slides available on Slideshare. We've all had deals that get stuck in a rut. I get asked about this situation frequently on my sales training courses. You did a great job understanding the client's needs. You put a great business case together. The client said they'd make a decision on Friday.

Also available as a Slideshare. As sales people we know that we need to listen to prospects, but how good are we? One of the best tips I ever heard (lol) on listening, was that most people are not actually listening, rather they are waiting for the other person to finish, so that they can then speak.

Social Selling? Best thing since sliced bread or the best waste of time since the Xbox? According to Forbes, 78.6% of sales people who are using social media out performed those who weren't. Social selling must therefore be really good? Right?

Those of us who are old enough to remember the dotcom boom, are currently waiting for the social media bubble to burst. The problem is that we're all still waiting. Seems like 'Social' is here to stay. So love it or loath it, as sales people, we need to get our heads around it.

The ability of a company to manage and grow their key accounts is critical to their long term success. With this in mind, Salestrong take a long term, strategic and team based approach to Key Account Management. Key Account Management is unlike ... Continue reading →

As the owner of a sales training business, I often get asked how I got into sales by clients and especially at graduate sales careers events. As it happens, it was pretty much by chance.

I recently guest blogged for The Pepperdine University School of Business and Management. The topic was on 'Flipping Your Sales Training' which looks at a technique for improving sales effectiveness which dispenses with the traditional sales training techniques. In these sessions we perform live deal reviews with the students in the training room.

The sales person enters the room on the 'Sales Voice Show'. The Sales Manager's red swivel chair is facing away from them. The Sales Manager says, "Now give me your best elevator pitch!" After an agonising few rambling, mumbling minutes of features and benefits, the sales manager delivers their feedback.

When you're going for a sales position, think of it as a sale. You're selling yourself. Here's a checklist to make sure you do great job when attending a sales interview. Also available in video, podcast and slideshare. Decision Criteria The first thing you need to do is be clear on how they are making their decision.

What's the biggest problem in selling today? Need to think about it? Really? We hear it all the time in our sales training classes. It's obvious, so I'll give you a minute...... Got it? Yes! It's arriving too late in the sales process for the sales people to be effective!

Liar, liar, pants on fire! A taunt so often hurled across corporate board rooms. We've all said it at some time in our lives. But have you ever seen it? I mean, the last time someone lied to you, did their pants spontaneously combust? Could you smell any burning at all?

Calculating Response Times For Sales Leads Maths just isn't the same in schools these days. I reminded my seven year old daughter of this when I asked her this question about calculating speed: "If I have two apples and three oranges, how fast am I going?"

During a sales training course, I was recently asked by a client how to really work a trade show booth. She then asked me to prepare her sales team for the trade show that was coming up.

Here at Salestrong our job is to come up with sales training ideas that make world class sales training courses. We love our job and to spread the love, we thought it might be useful to give five key ideas that could help you to improve your sales performance.

As part of our sales training courses, we've been designing and delivering online sales training for over 10 years. So we feel qualified to advise on the question of the effectiveness of online sales training. In order to see if it will be effective for you, we need to look at what outcomes you're looking for.