selling skills

I love teaching emotional intelligence and consultative selling skills.  Development of both skills make a real difference in hard sales results.

Bob Flexon, CEO of Dynegy, is on a mission to change the culture at his company. He arrived at Dynegy four months before they filed for bankruptcy.  Under his leadership, Mr. Flexon started putting changes in place to change the culture. His belief: change the culture and you will change revenues and achieve long term success.

I am a huge movie fan and like nothing better than to curl up and watch a plot unfold.  Many times, I get inspiration for new training material from watching movies that are totally not related to anything in sales.

Viewers watched in anticipation as Lance Armstrong answered questions from the queen of television, Oprah Winfrey.  She asked direct questions regarding his involvement with doping and other illegal drugs during his racing career.  Lance’s answers provide some great lessons for all of us.  Sure, it’s easy to sit back and judge Lance.

An empathetic salesperson – almost sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?  It’s time to pay attention to this emotional intelligence skill because empathetic salespeople often outperform their non-empathetic counterparts.   

Salespeople default to weird language and behaviors during sales meetings.  Perfectly normal human beings start saying and doing things that absolutely shut down a sales conversation. One of the worst ways to shut down a conversation is to ask your prospect leading questions.  These questions sound like:

I first heard this quote at a national sales conference I attended in my early 20’s.  (Don’t even go there—you will run out of fingers and toes.)

October is here and so is fourth quarter.  This is always an interesting quarter for sales professionals because you are working to achieve 2012 goals but also have to start working on hitting Q1 goals for 2013.

Unfortunately, many salespeople give into the pull of instant gratification.  Instead of taking time to analyze their business, they just keep doing what they have always done, hoping for better results. 

I was reading the August edition of Forbes magazine and found two different articles with very similar themes: good things happen when people actually talk to one another.