Sales Tips and Coaching from the Front Line

These sales tips and coaching in strategy, tactics and tools will help sales people of all descriptions manage their process. For an easy to read compilation of the best advice and ideas get a copy of our Principles of Professional Selling tutorial.

The Lost Art of Sales Training

Sales training appears to be a lost art these days, Companies no longer train their sales people. Every business wants to hire hot shot, proven guys who can hit the road running. That’s the only way to run a cost effective sales function, or at least thats the way it seems. They treat sales reps [...]

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Sales Coaching You Don’t Need

Sales Coach

I’m really great at selling, just not very good when it comes to talking about price or asking for the order. This little gem came from somebody whose name’s long forgotten. It resonated with me, not because she didn’t like closing – lots of people feel like that – but because that particular forum was [...]

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Three Essential Dimensions When Selling B2B

Sales Coach

B2B sales of services can complicated, for me at least. There are always multiple targets, and we have to find the bulls eye for each if we’re going to make the sale. B2B selling is very different to B2C and the sales process must accommodate the extra dimensions. Business Strategy In today’s controlled world businesses [...]

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Do We Go After This Deal

Sales Coach

Bid review is an essential step in best practice sales management. It is broadly the same for any sales opportunity, although for smaller, simpler deals the milestones can all be part of the same conversation. For bigger deals planning and executing a process is imperative. The higher value will warrant more of an investment in [...]

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The Worst Kind of Sales Coaching

Sales Coach

Sales Coaching like this can be dangerous when it influences people looking for straight advice about how professional sales skills. There’s more garbage talked about sales skills than there is about sex, or making money with your blog, or social media marketing. It’s all crap and winds me up because there are some unfortunates out [...]

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Selling What the Customer is Buying

Sales Coach

Selling what the customer is buying is the simple approach. Getting the customer to buy what the sales guy is selling is much harder. Why on earth do those motivational sales books suggest that type of pitching is the ultimate skill? It’s arrant nonsense as should be evident to anybody who ever bought something. Just [...]

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When Do You Use the Conditional Close

Sales Coach

Conditional Close is one of my favourite techniques to close a sale. It helps me test the prospects view of my offer without any sense of pressure or threat. So I’ll try to close every sale with it, and as early in the sales process as possible. Please note it’s not a trick but a [...]

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Managing the Difficult Prospect

Sales Coach

The Difficult Prospect – we’ve all got them. We can’t deal with them, and can’t make a living without them. Are there strategies we can use to control the conversation with the deals we can win? Are there tactics we can use to close or kill the ones we can’t? What’s a poor sales guy [...]

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Selling is Easy

Sales Coach

Selling is easy, it’s the learning to sell that’s hard. Exactly the opposite of everything those courses and books tell us. They claim learning to sell is easy, with their ideas, and selling is hard without them. If I sold sales training, or books with the silver bullet answer I’d be saying the same thing. [...]

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