New Post on MoneyWatch – 4 Tips to Get Your Email Read — And Answered!
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New Blog Post on MoneyWatch – Sell a Lot and Have Your Customers Love You!
Great interview excerpt with Jeffrey Gitomer – check it out on MoneyWatch!
How do Quota-Crushing Sales Teams Land Their Biggest Deals?
Sales superstars aren’t luckier or smarter than you. Instead, they have a system that allows them to win bigger deals more often with bigger companies, regardless of the competitor.
I want to invite my readers to a free webinar I’m putting on Thursday, June 30th at 11:00a.m. EST. During the webinar, you’ll learn how to:
-Change your message to get bigger companies to buy bigger solutions
-Move prospects from interest to decision in a complex sales process
-Find the real decision makers and turn them into “sponsors”
-ID and get rid of “black hole prospects”
We’re also going to give you the five keys to building your own system, a “Big Sale Factory” to help you produce quota-crushing results.
This webinar is a great extension of the things I’ve written about here and over at BNet, and it’s a chance to start moving your company to the next level.
Register for the webinar here:
http://bit.ly/YourBiggestDealEver
London Calling: Ideas are Spreading
Ideas have power. And there’s nothing more powerful than watching ideas spread.
A while back I was contacted by a reporter for the Financial Times of London, looking to do a story on small companies hunting big deals. It’s what we do at Hunt Big Sales, and it’s so exciting to see the idea taking hold around the world. Here’s the message Londoners saw in their morning paper:
“Small companies too often focus on their advantages and unique value proposition when selling to bigger companies. Those benefits open the door, but closing the sale comes from overcoming their fears over your size and resources.
“Smaller companies need to ask themselves: what would scare this prospect about buying from us? Prepare your answers and deliver them regardless of whether the company asks.
“Many small companies lose big sales not because they hunt for too few, but because they hunt for too many. I advise small companies to create a rubric for evaluating their largest prospects. How that opportunity scores will determine whether or not a small company should expend the effort. These rubrics should be customised for each business, but a few standard questions include: do we have an executive sponsor in this prospect, what difference will we make compared with other competitors, how long has the incumbent been in place, and how many bid cycles have they survived?”
You can read the rest of the articles at the Financial Times web site (registration is required), but this post is about more than tooting my own horn.
The Best “Biggest Sales” Stories of 2010.
Where’s our chance to brag? Those of us that are united by the desire to land that huge sale, compete against companies much bigger than ourselves and come out on top, to take the big swing rather than going for the easy single or double- where’s our parade? I want our awards show! We deserve a chance to showcase our biggest and best sales stories of 2010 and I am going provide that place right here-
The top 5 stories will receive full profiles in my future blogs – including deal details, company highlights and podcast interviews with the winners.
Here’s what I need you to do:
Post up, right here and now, your biggest deal profile from 2010. This is your chance to shine, so don’t be shy. Answer a few key pieces:
- What made the sale big?
- What did you do differently?
- What one tip would give someone else to land a big sale like you did?
I want to get this bragging opportunity to at least 1,000 people, so post this link into LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else you interact with people who are part of this community of hunters: http://tinyurl.com/beststoriesof2010
I want to get 200 comments from coast to coast. I can’t do this without you so post your comment below right now.
Do this fast- We’re already into 2011 and I want to make certain that we get your glory now so you can take the lessons from the stories for your next biggest deal.
Boldly Blogging Where No Man Has Blogged Before…
Alright, people have blogged at BNet, the CBS Interactive Business Network, before… but my blog just premiered last week! Here’s a video we shot with all the details. (You can catch a glimpse of the new Hunt Big Sales offices in the background.)
Check Out Tom’s New Blog! from Hunt Big Sales on Vimeo.
If you’ve got a few seconds, head over to bnet.com/blog/smb-sales-advice and check out the new blog!
Great Sales Brain Food
I am really glad to let you know that some friends of mine in the sales training space at Caskey Training have got a great online video training that is free and available every Wednesday. It’s called “Whiteboard Wednesday TV” and it is available to you starting now. Go to the link and click on it to see and sign up.
Bill Caskey, Bryan Neal and Brooke Green are the three people who do this sales training and they are awesome. I think you will get a lot out of this and I encourage you to go to the site right now and check it out.
Enjoy!
Best Experience Ever
I just finished a 16-day trip to Asia with my son and it was probably one of the best experiences of my life.
I don’t often write about personal things in this blog- but so many of you were helpful when I asked for suggestions for this trip that I wanted to let you know how it went. However, I am not going to give you a travelogue of the trip- I just want to take a few minutes and tell you about what I learned in the process of planning and having this incredibly special trip with my son, a gift to him for his graduation from high school.
First, in full disclosure, the idea of doing this trip was taken from a great friend of mine, Eric Protzman. When each of his children graduated from high-school, he took them on a long trip to anywhere that they wanted to go. The deal was that it would be just the two of them, they had to help with the planning and it had to be someplace that they had not been before.
When I asked for some context from Eric, he laid it out this way:
“Tom, you will never have a chance to have this time with your child again. They won’t be able to take the time from school, commitments, spouses or children or careers to do a trip like this except at this very particular time in their lives- right after they graduate high-school. Also, it is the perfect time to re-write some of the rules of your relationship.
Introducing: My Best Blogs
Hi All,
Just a quick housekeeping item for you: I’ve introduced the “My Best Blogs” archive. Reason being, I constantly find myself having to dig for oldies-but-goodies that I think would be great for driving home various point to sales teams. But digging these things out all the time is a waste of time, so I’ve decided to get organized. My Best Blogs contains an easy-to-navigate list of some of my favorite and most frequently-requested blog posts and guest posts, organized loosely by topic category.
If you notice any glaring ommissions, please let me know. Otherwise, enjoy!
- Tom
RFPs Suck! goes international. And paperback!
By now you may or may not have purchased my new book, RFPs Suck! If you haven’t, you can purchase it here. It’s now in paperback. Call me biased, but I highly recommend it.
The latest stop on my book tour/media blitz was with Ian Brodie, one of the best sales consultants across the pond. Ian works with professional service firms–consultants, lawyers, accountants, surveyors, architects and coaches–to help them attract more clients and win more new business. You can check out the interview on his site, IanBrodie.com.
Thanks, Ian!
