Your Sales Proposal Should Look Like This

Alan Rigg identifies the components of winning sales proposals and shares brief descriptions of nine suggested sections of a sales proposal outline.

Sales Proposals - Write Them With Your Prospect

If you are not selling in a tightly-controlled, RFP-driven sales environment, you might want to consider this collaborative approach for getting your proposals approved. Dave Stein explains why collaboration on the sales proposal outline really makes sense now, during these unsure economic times.

A Three-Step Sales Qualifying Process

Paul Cherry dissects a prospecting call and provides a three-step process with qualifying questions, which will help you evaluate whether or not a prospective client is truly interested in doing business with you. Not only will you save time, money, and irritation for both yourself and your prospects, but the answers you’ll uncover will help you better prepare any future proposal you might submit to them.

Sales Script Writing for Cold Calling or Prospecting

4 things you should think about when writing a telephone sales script and  a few additional resources to help you create an effective prospecting sales script or template for cold calling.

Without Urgency, You’ll End Up With A Stalled Deal

Craig James outlines some important things to think about for your next sales prospect to prevent unnecessary stalls and delays. And while the advice is good intellectually, the most important reminder is to have the guts to follow-through.

Selling Technology To The C-Level Executive - Whitepaper

In a recession, sales of business technology slow down like anything else. But some tech vendors are doing better than others in these trying times, driven by how they approach customers with their value proposition and how they substantiate their claims with economic information. Now, more than ever, customers are seeking value justification before they open their purse strings, and the person holding the strings most frequently is the CFO. 

What does the CFO need to see to believe in your technology solution? After the main business benefits have been well defined and understood, the CFO wants to see a true value proposition instead of the half-baked fuzzy propositions and value notions of days gone past.

A shift towards enhanced financial accountability has occurred, and the technology vendors responding to this fact stand a greater chance of initiating and closing the deal. But just doing the numbers isn’t enough. CFOs also need to be presented this information in a way that improves the chances of sales success. 

A very useful whitepaper in PDF format by Bruce Scheer of FutureSight Consulting about selling to the CFO.

Is Closing Your Problem? Or Is It Your Sales Pipeline?

Ever heard anyone say something like…” we need more people able to close… you need to teach us closing skills…” Well, closing starts a long time before the end of the sale and the reason why most deals do not close is more to do with the way they are opened, rather than not being able to close… if you have people who can’t close then do some analysis on their pipeline.

Breaking the “Just Following Up” Habit

Geoff Alexander states the obvious but unfortunately, many of us in sales could still use his reminder. Always have a clear, sales-oriented objective for each call based on what you’d like to achieve as an outcome, begin your call by stating it, and add this sales technique to your Best Practices playbook.

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