There has been a huge amount of recent debate about how the role of the professional seller is changing. Technology, the internet, social media etc. are and will have a significant impact in terms of how we sell (Sales 2.0). This does not mean however, that age old sale principles are now or are fast becoming redundant.
Fear of public speaking ranks as the number one fear for the general public, even for experienced business or salespeople, having to deliver an important presentation can be extremely nerve wracking. While there is a wealth of available excellent advice on planning and delivering business presentations. This often fails to help, because it doesn’t directly tackle the individuals fear factor.
The nominations for the Irish Blog Awards were announced this week, and guess what? we have been nominated in the best new blog category.
A BIG THANK YOU to whoever put us forward, and GOOD LUCK to everyone involved.
E-mailing is now undoubtedly the main means of communication between businesses and business people. I would continue to advise salespeople to always try to speak directly to prospects where possible. There are times however that e-mailing is the only available option, so the ability to craft effective e-mails is now a very necessary sales skill.
This current economic climate creates a temptation or indeed desperation, where businesses may decide to offer customers much larger levels of discount. My last post talked about why businesses, particularly smaller companies need to be careful when it comes to offering one off or exceptional discounts.
Jonathan Farrington wrote an excellent post, on why smaller companies are well positioned to do well in the year ahead. In it, Jonathan describes the factors that give a smaller company an edge including:
Not being weighted down by unnecessary bureaucracy
An ability to make decisions quickly
Being more capable of building stronger, sustainable relationships with customers
Jonathan goes on to talk about why 2009 will be the year of “Customer Focus” describing what is meant by the term, and why it creates competitive advantage.
I thought for my first post of 2009, Id start with a hypothetical situation about two imaginary competing companies contemplating what 2009 will have in store.
While these companies are of a similar size and operate in the same space, their philosophy as to how best deal with the situation is entirely different.
So why not name them after their individual philosophies.
