Effective Selling Begins with Information

by Dave Kahle

Most sales people love to be active — out in our territories, seeing people, solving problems, putting deals together.  This activity-orientation is one of the characteristics of a sales personality.  A day sitting behind a desk is our idea of purgatory.  Unfortunately, this activity orientation is both a strength and weakness.  Much of our ability to produce results finds its genesis in our activity orientation.  It provides some of the energy to move us to sales success.

           But it can be a major obstacle.  Far too often, we’re guilty of going about our jobs directed by the credo of “Ready, shoot…aim.”  The luxury of this kind of unfocused activity is a casualty of the Information Age.  As a sales person committed to constant improvement, you understand that, to be effective you must be focused and thoughtful about everything you do.  Activity without forethought and planning is a needless waste of time and energy.

           If you were going to build a home, for example, you’d want to know about the nature of the ground on which the home was to be built.  You’d need to have a good idea about what kind of weather conditions the home would be enduring, what the building codes were, what materials were available and what they cost, and what kind of skilled workmen were required.  The list could go on and on.  The point is that you wouldn’t be able to build a home very effectively if you didn’t have good information on which to base those plans.

What’s the single best thing you can do to expand your B2B sales?

Invest your selling time where it will get the best results.

And that means that you methodically and systematically rank your accounts by their potential and then adjust your investment of selling time.

In over 30 years of working with over 500 sales organizations, I’ve developed a system to do that and taught it to hundreds of sales teams. 

Join me on October 6^th, at 12:30 Eastern, for a one-hour webinar, and I’ll teach it to you as well.

It will be the best $47 you have ever spent.

  The same principles apply to building a home as well as delivering effective sales performance.  In both cases, good planning requires good information.  It may be that your company provides you all the information you need.  But, it’s more likely they don’t.  If you’re going to work with good information, you must be the one who collects that information.  That means that you must create systems to collect, store and use the information that will be most helpful to you.  Since our world is constantly producing new information, the system you create isn’t something you do once and forget.  Rather, it has to be a dynamic system that is constantly processing, storing and using new information.

           The Information-Collecting Process

           Creating and maintaining your system is a matter of following several specific steps.  Here’s the process:

1.     Create a list of the categories of information you’d like to have.

2.     Working with one category at a time, brainstorm a list of all the pieces of information you’d like to have within that category.

3.     Develop a system and some tools to help you collect that information.

4.     Store it efficiently.

5.     Use it regularly.

           Step One.  Start by listing the kinds of information you think will be most useful to you.

           Think about your job and determine ... CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE.