Sellers: How To Calculate Your Value? – The Value Equation
Communicating your value to today’s hard-nosed buyers can be a real challenge. You know that your marketing literature won’t do it. You know that your sales pitches and proposals must. Price Versus Value Many buyers have an almost single-minded obsession with price. That makes moving the conversation off price and onto value the seller’s priority. But […]
Why CPO’s Get Upset Watching The News
What you own you control, but big corporations no longer own large chunks of their production process, or supply chain. They are increasingly dependent on outside actors for their success and are vulnerable to a new array of risks as a result. Resilience and Risk Management Global supply chains mean that organizations are dependent on […]
Justify With Numbers – Compel With Emotions
Fact sheets, spreadsheets and ROI calculators are vital sales tools, but they are not enough. The seller must tap into the buyer’s underlying buying motivations and emotions as well as connecting with the buyers logic and analysis to improve sales performance. Moving Beyond The Calculator In Selling In business, emotions are generally considered unhelpful at […]
What Science Tells Us About The Speed Of Buying
Today’s buyers are slower to decide and that makes sales cycles longer. That sounds like a statement of the obvious, but it is actually grounded in our most up-to-date understanding of the workings of the human brain. Scientists Reveal The True Speed Of Buying You don’t need to understand cognitive science in order to know […]
Contract Compliance – Implications For Sellers
Buyers are getting better at managing their contracts with suppliers. In this article we will example the implications for sellers of the new focus on contract management. We are all aware of the increased attention paid by buyers to the issue of benefits realisation and the drive to ensure that the promised savings […]
Buyers Are Taking ‘Baby Steps’
In an effort to minimize risk buyers are taking smaller steps as they progress towards major buying decisions.
The Ultimate Test of The Sales Pro: Helping Buyers To Buy
‘Helping the buyer to buy’ may sound soft, compared to pitching, persuading and closing for example. However, the reality couldn’t be more different.
Pipeline Opportunities: Can You Spot The Warning Signals?
Based on a review of hundreds of pipeline opportunities we have spotted some common early warning signals that an opportunity may be at risk. Use the list to review your top three sales opportunities. Tick the items that are relevant to the opportunity you are considering. 1. Don’t have access to all the stakeholders. [ […]
Buyers Face 3 Business Case Challenges
Predicting the future is not easy, but that is exactly what the business case must attempt to do. This is particularly true in a time of market turbulence. Today’s perfect plan could be completely invalidated by a change in the competitive situation, an upset in the market or any one of a host of other […]
What Are Buyers Thinking?
Why do buyers do what they do? Why do they choose one supplier over another and choose some projects to be scrapped, while others are advanced? These are questions that understandably intrigue salespeople. Buyers tend to reveal little, leaving many salespeople complaining that they don’t know what buyers are thinking. They may even complain buyers […]
Examining the Business Case – Considerations Of Risk
The business case requires much more than a cost-benefit analysis — that is too simplistic for complex business decisions. For example, a more in-depth analysis would highlight that while the payback from project A might be twice that of project B, this benefit may be negated when higher levels of risk are considered. Managers are […]
Buyers Are In ‘Play It Safe!’ Mode
(a) ‘Playing it Safe’ For buyers this is the era of ‘playing it safe’. The cost – benefits equation calculated in respect of each major purchase decision has a vital new dimension – that of risk. This is having a major impact on the nature of decision making. The appetite for risk has diminished greatly. […]
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