Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: Sales Every top sales person knows they will face objections. The most successful sales people aggressively prepare for the objections beforehand and address them directly, in order to win the sale. You can too. Here's what it takes.
Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: Marketing The best time for marketing is when they aren't buying.
Be realistic. If you aren't selling the hottest new fashion or gizmo for holiday gift-giving, it's hard to get anyone to think about buying your product or service from Thanksgiving through Christmas and New Year's. That's a six week lean selling stretch for lots of sales professionals. When you are trying to hit your quarterly and year-end numbers that lean stretch can be tough to swallow.
Spring is a great antidote to long cold winters. It's the same with action and inaction. Action is a powerful antidote to the stagnation of inactivity. Being creatively alive involves abandoning a position of inaction in circumstances which have traditionally immobilized you. The name of the game is action. Doing. Overcoming your inertia and acting will give you a whole new lease on being creatively alive.
The following is based on an essay by Denny Howe at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our core values give us personal focus, strength, resilience, and meaning when the outside world doesn't always give us what we think we need or want. One of the challenges in maintaining behavior consistent with our core values is the perception of significance. How significant something becomes is directly proportional to the amount of emotional energy we give it.
Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: Marketing Whether you love it or hate it, marketing and sales are critical to the life blood of any business. You can make it more fun, if you take the approach that you want to seriously flirt with a growing list of prospects.
Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: Business When you start your own business, you commit to investing your time, talent and resources in the business to make it succeed. You authorize a spending plan; you ask the bank, your credit card company, friends, family, employees, to endow the business to follow your business plan and implement your marketing plan. There's more to it. You need to determine where you can differentiate your company from the competition, so where should you invest the most resources?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher said "The primary wisdom is intuition." It is not just a theory, it is part of who we are. Without training we can happen upon it occasionally and we usually like the results when we follow our intuition. What would happen if we learned to tap into our own innate intuition on a daily basis? Why don't we? As Carl Jung said "intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.
Yes you can do it without being loathsome.
Parties are times of celebration. They can also be a fun opportunity to network with people you don't often get to meet or be with.
This is the season for weddings, graduations, college reunions and family reunions. At these events, everyone knows why you are there. Take advantage of that connection.
Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: Marketing It's such an easy question to ask: "Who's your ideal customer?" And it can be so challenging to answer! After a presentation I gave last night, one of the attendees approached me to say she had two ideal niches she loves to work in and yet because she wants both, she's struggling to reach either one. I'm not surprised.
Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: Marketing At a meeting the other day, a marketing consultant opened her talk by asking the group, "What are you worth?" She went on to discuss all the different ways we minimize our worth or discount our value in desperate attempts to close the sale. After all the pitfalls of pricing and selling were laid out, she closed the talk by asking again, "What are you worth?"
After 3 long days of a very intensive workshop in Toronto, a group of us decided to go canoeing for a day, up in Barre, Ontario (an hour north of Toronto) on the Nottawasaga River. It was a warm day, the water was warm, and no one else was on this pristine flat-water river winding through a protected swamp.
After hearing Daniel Pink speak about his new book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age for the fourth time, I finally read it cover to cover (less than a day). I finally got what he's talking about when he says jobs that are high touch are here to stay. That is, jobs that builds relationships between business and client whether it's B2B or B2C.
For all of us, emotional intelligence encompasses five basic areas of mastery.
These ten commandments of human relations aren't original to me, and I don't know the source. At the same time, they don't go out of style or out of date if you are in business. Everyone in your business must imbue their efforts with these commandments. They are required in every type of relationship be it marketing or selling to clients, providing customer support before or after the sale, working with and negotiating with vendors or your support team and of course internal to your organization.
I'm an alumni of Boston University Graduate School of Business, so I receive the Alumni magazine Bostonia. To be honest, that doesn't mean I read it faithfully at all. But this issue was different. George Labovitz, a professor in organizational behavior at the school wrote an article recently on his research into the application of alignment to achieve extraordinary results in organizations.
Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: CRM When you close the sale with a new client don't you feel great? Did you know that you increase the lifelong value of that new client by doing a few more steps? They aren't secrets, but when you apply them, they unlock the door to greater returns for you.
Expert Author: Kerri Salls | Category: Success Based on John Maxwell's The Success Journey. Here are 10 Principles to becoming a dedicated self-developer. I'll be reflecting on this as I take a break this week.
Surveys are interesting. I took note of this one done recently by American Express because it backed up some data I learned at the (National Association of Female Executives) NAFE National Conference in May. According to the survey, 40 per cent of the smallest business owners - those with less than $200,000 in annual revenues - are planning no vacation whatsoever this summer.
Last week I talked about how to take a vacation when you're the leader of the band. This week I want to talk about summer sales. Many sales people and just as many business owners bemoan their annual summer sales slump. Their numbers are down and they just can't understand it.
Great leadership is the key to success. Great communication is the key to great leadership. Think of any great leader in modern time: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, and John F. Kennedy come to mind immediately. They were powerful leaders because they could inspire people to follow them. It was their ability to articulate their vision that made them successful in achieving their goals.
