What You Missed Last Week in Sales: October 7, 2013

Did you catch the latest and greatest sales-related content on the web from last week? There were posts about what prospects want, the 50-50 optimal conversation balance, pointed questions for sales leaders, overcoming your phobia of snakes, and why you shouldn't hit "reply all".

Enjoy!

Stop Giving Prospects What They Don't Want

Are you sure you're in tune with your prospect? Make sure you're keeping things simple, helpful, factual, and consultative. When you inundate a prospect with too much information or challenge them, you're going to stress them out and greatly decrease your chances of moving the conversation forward.

"Talking is like drinking a great Cabernet. Listening is like doing squats." 

You talk way too much. As salespeople, we are naturally talkative, so chances are, you were spoke more than 50% of the time. It's hard to hold back -- there's so much you want to say and you want to include all the details -- but that's a great way to lose your prospect's attention. In order to achieve the optimum 50-50 conversational balance, make sure to ask questions, listen to what they have to say, find openings, and monitor your prospect's verbal cues and tone.

Customer-Oriented Companies Outperform the Market by Almost 400%

Is your sales organization geared towards hitting numbers or towards helping customers? The latter approach yields greater success. Here are Five Questions for Leaders to help you determine where on the spectrum your sales organization falls. If you find that most of your answers don't involve the customer, you might need to re-evaluate your strategy because it is mediocre.

Sales and Curing Fear of Snakes Have a Lot in Common

"Vicarious experience is exposing prospects (or snake phobics) to others who are demonstrating a behavior. The subjects then learn from the others' successes and failures." Essentially, you need to provide your prospects with stories of how other prospects facing similar problems were able to solve them using your products or services. While your prospect probably did research ahead of time and knows the benefits of your products or services, hearing about the experience of another person using them solidifies legitimancy and acceptance.

For the Love of Sales, Don't Hit "Reply All" 

Dealing with prospects, customers, and everyone in between can be frustrating at times. If one of your prospects or customers is sending you email after email, demanding answers you don't know, you might end up forwarding along these requests to other members of your organization -- a product manager, someone on your services team -- who can handle the requests more effectively. Just make sure you keep the forwarded note professional in case of an accidental reply all so you don't end up in a total PR mess like this company.

What other sales stories did you come across this past week? Share your recommendations in the comment section below.