The way you talk about your competitors tells prospects and customers a lot about your company and the way you do business. Here are some guidelines sellers and marketers can use to avoid leaving a negative impression and potentially losing business.
What’s the best way to get a buyer’s attention, move deals quickly through the buying cycle, and increase close rates? Follow these five fundamental steps. (For a handy summary of these steps, download our tip sheet, "5 Steps to Close More Deals.")
One of my fundamental beliefs is that the strategic marketing team—not sales, finance or operations—should own pricing. The reason is that marketing is best equipped to set the optimal price and maximize an offering's lifetime value.
Sales and marketing professionals often seek a TCO analysis to help grow sales and close deals when an ROI analysis would actually be far more beneficial. I know this because I get frequent requests to create TCO tools, and my first question is, “What problem are you trying to solve?”
It’s happened to the best of us. You tell a prospect how much your product or service costs and they respond with silence. This is known as “sticker shock” and if you’ve done your job as a salesperson, your customer should never experience this.
What makes sales management such a tough job? There are many reasons, but a very basic one is that your success as a B2B sales manager depends on the performance of your sales team. If your sales team doesn’t perform well and make quota—despite your best efforts to coach, motivate, support, mentor, and lead—then you can’t succeed.
Setting the price for your offering is critical. Price dictates whether or not your offering will succeed or fail in the marketplace. A price that’s too low can cause you to operate in the red or leave profits on the table. However, a price that’s too high could create drag on the sales cycle or make it tough for your salespeople to close deals. Why Common Pricing Strategies Fail When setting price, you’re looking for the optimal price to maximize profitability. That number is not the highest price possible nor is it based solely on what your competition charges, yet I hear many marketers talk about pricing in exactly those terms. Here are the two most common approaches to pricing I see.
Using a value-based sales approach helps sales teams succeed consistently and more frequently. These four tips from the world of value selling can help move deals through the buying cycle faster and increase close rates.
The other day I caught a reference on an episode of Mad Men to the Four P’s. The episode was set in the early 1970’s, which means Phil Kotler’s game-changing concept of the Four P’s (product, price, placement, and promotion) had just recently been published in his book, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control.
It’s every sales manager’s nightmare. While reviewing the sales team’s monthly sales forecasts, too many opportunities forecasted to close this month at 90% probability are deals that were previously forecasted to close at similar rates of probability. Why so little progress in closing these deals?
