Richard Ruff

The economics of selling. Bain published a particularly interesting article noting that historically companies in the B2B market – “consistently grew their revenue faster than their sales and marketing expenses.”

But that was then; this is now.  Over the last decade the game has begun to change.  Bain analyzed 200 large US-based companies between 2003-2011 – “over half of the companies had increasing sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue.”  Profit margins are under increasing pressure.

Now, it is safe to say that no one single factor is the cause of this trend.  But one deserves particular attention.

Over the last several years customers’ expectations about their suppliers have become higher than in times past.  During the sales process vendors are expected to bring real expertise to the party versus just selling products.  They must help the...

Sales coaching – it’s easy to mistake critique for correction.  Sales coaching is all about helping sales people improve their performance skills.  Therefore, it is not just a matter of someone “knowing” something – it is about someone “doing” something.

Let’s sharpen the difference by listening in on a sales coaching session between a sales manager and their sales rep that’s following a sales call.  The sales manager correctly first listen to what the sales rep thought about the call and then said the following:

“Lee, great call and a good self-analysis.  I just have one build.  I noticed you did a lot of talking during the call.  My sense is we need to get the customer talking more.  One way to get at that is to ask more questions.  Let me put together some tips about that and we can...

Each year companies spend a lot of time, money, and effort implementing sales training and sales coaching efforts to help their sales team learn new sales methodologies and processes.  There is some good news and some bad news.

The good news is we know that adoption of a well-designed sales methodology positively impacts results.  A recent analysis report by Accenture of the 2012 Sales Performance Optimization Study by CSO Insights documents that correlation.

In their analysis – Sales reps achieved 70% of their sales targets when they used their company’s sales methodology 90% of the time.

On the other hand, the percentage of time the sales targets were reached dropped to 55% for sales reps that used their...

If we could listen to all the internal sales conversations occurring during any 30-minute period and do a word count, “selling value” would be right at the top of the list.

The modern formulation of selling value has been around for a long time – let’s say at least 30 years.  Today almost everyone agrees that the capability to sell value is a survival skill for any sales team.  Everyone nods that it is really important – unfortunately not everyone is really good at it.

Learning how to sell value is challenging – particularly given that everyone else is trying to do it – so sales people must master the skill if they are to stand out from the crowd.

Let’s take a deeper dive.  We will examine some of ideas masquerading as “selling value” and then explore what sales...