Collecting WINS Blog
By James Rores
Do You Sell the Way People Buy?
Introducing the Universal Buying Cycle™. Most sales and marketing leaders spend countless hours designing new ways to direct buyers down the perfect sales process. They invent shared terminology to communicate this path internally, plot metrics around it and work hard to shepherd buyers to a decision that is in their favor. I know this exercise very well. This is what I did for the first half of my sales career and what [...]
A Need Without Value Is Not an Opportunity. It’s Just A Need.
Is the customer NEED the most important thing we must learn in sales? We may hate to admit it, but we’re creatures of habit. I’m not talking about habits many of us aspire to - waking up early, exercising, reading regularly, etc. There are only a few people that actually hold the good habits. I’m talking about bigger habits in our lives. We’re habitual in our thoughts, our behaviors, and our actions. [...]
Confronting ‘The Challenger Sale’
The Challenger Sale has been called the best marketed but worse executed sales program in history. Is this assessment fair or evidence of sour grapes from a few industry experts who wish they could claim the 800,000+ graduates and 500,000+ books sold since 2011? I am frequently asked versions of this question by executives and salespeople who are considering investing in Challenger sales training, or wondering if their investment was worthwhile. To [...]
How to Build a Foundational Sales Playbook
An old and all-too-common story When leaders build or rebuild sales teams, they often move quickly to hire the best individual contributors available and allow each to leverage their own skills and experiences to find success. These leaders take a hands-off approach, essentially providing new hires little more than a comp-plan, a territory, a desk and a computer. Then they wrap it all up with a few encouraging words like, "go get 'em [...]
Developing Winning Habits for Sales Success – Part Three
How investing in the right tools can help you remove barriers to growth In our last blog, I mentioned that Toolset is an important investment for companies seeking to create a predictable, repeatable sales process, but these tools will never reach their full effectiveness without first establishing the right Mindset and Skillset required to use them. If you missed Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I highly encourage you to review them [...]
Developing Winning Habits for Sales Success – Part Two
Mindset, Skillset and Toolset Companies build or buy tools to make success more predictable and repeatable, but without the right skills employees experience those tools as useless or marginally effective at best. Of course, employee training programs can help. However, without the proper mindset or beliefs, participants will greet your training with resistance, which is why so many hiring and training investments fail to deliver promised results. To deliver on our promise of [...]