Uncertainty in the current economy can help you close more business now and build your long term results. Sounds counter intuitive, doesn’t it?  But maybe it isn’t counter intuitive at all.Suspend your dis-belief for about 4 minutes and see what you think.

All of us in sales have, since day one, had it drilled into us that we must "ask for commitment" from the buyer. Unfortunately, too many of us interpret this to mean simply, "ask for the order". Thus, we feel that the only time to ask for commitment is at the end of the sale - at the "close" - when we ask for the Ultimate Commitment.

Join us for a free online webinar brought to you by Landslide Technologies.Join Razi Imam, Founder and CEO, Landslide Technologies on June 23rd at 1 p.m. Eastern to learn the 5 steps to building a Sales Production System that will help you increase your sales volume, value and velocity. Also hear about the great results that customers using the Sales Production System approach are seeing.
Tuesday June 23rd, 2009, 1pm - 2pm ET / 10am - 11am PTRegister Now! - CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.

In this podcast Keith Rosen, the author of Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, shares his insights on some of the inherent challenges that managers need to overcome today when coaching their salespeople.

Sales meetings are a fact of life and business and they are important for a variety of reasons.
-They allow larger companies to address the entire sales team as a group.
-They offer opportunities to provide additional training (product, skills, and technical).
-They help keep your team up-to-date.

Looking at your selling scorecard at the end of this month will indicate that you are either at plan, behind plan or ahead of plan.
Obviously,
behind plan = failure to succeed,
at plan = meeting expectations,
ahead of plan = selling success.

When you make contact with a new prospect-either by telephone or in a face-to-face meeting-you have an extremely short window of time to connect with them. If you fail to achieve this they will quickly tune you out.

One can often see two ways of managing major accounts that are certain to fail. The first is management by chance. There is no control. There is no plan. No one can explain why we are winning the business or forecast how long our success will last. We do not learn from our mistakes or from our successes. This is at one extreme.

How in the world do we expect to learn what our prospects/customers need or want while we’re doing the talking? Many salespeople think that spewing their features and benefits at a prospect is the way to sell. That’s pretty dumb, especially today since a prospect can get all the product junk she needs on-line with one Google search.

I hear many sellers complain that directly asking for referrals is too uncomfortable so they would much rather generate referrals by asking their clients to recommend them when the opportunity occurs. Bad mistake.Not only do they misunderstand how to generate referrals, they’re confusing referrals with Word of Mouth Marketing.