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Charge up your selling with this blog
Montvale, N.J.-based Sales 2.0 publishes a great blog packed with short articles on selling.
The company's mission is "to improve the sales profession and take it to the next level."
And these guys know big IT sales. For example, Sales 2.0 founder Nigel Edelshain is a former chip designer with an MBA from Wharton who reluctantly went into sales during a downturn at his IT firm.
He admits his first year in sales was "tough" — but after he got the hang of it, he "sold millions of dollars of IT solutions to major Fortune 500 firms."
He was head of sales for financial services for Starpoint Solutions, a 600-person SI, and before that he sold IT services for Platinum Technology (now CA).
The blog is pragmatic, with threads on things like closing, prospecting, time management, and so on. Next we present some sample tips to give you the flavor of the site.
Overcome the objection to open source in your code
The objection: "Our policy is to never buy products that embed open source software."
The comeback: The economics of open source help customers get higher-quality software at lower cost.
"Open-source does present risk, and to not acknowledge this is naïve," says blogger Richard Fouts, founder of consulting firm Communicado. "But this is where consultative sales people can help...
"Advise your client to ask vendors how they support technical issues of products that embed open source. Ask how they provide the same level of legal support (for example, with warranty and indemnity)."
If you let your prospects know that their competitors are benefiting from open source, he suggests, you've given them some important information to help them make a wise decision. Just like any trusted advisor should.
Perfect your pitches: Use only seven words, and talk about your customer first, your company last
Here's another handy tip from Sales 2.0: How to make your pitches more simple, accessible, and memorable.
"I often ask sales people to describe what they do in seven words or less. Many initially say they can't possibly communicate the complexity of what they do in seven words," writes Fouts.
"But they can — and they do."
Why only seven words?
"There's actually a natural rhythm and ring to the number seven. George Miller (a cognitive psychologist) in his 1956 paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" details why seven is pretty much the cut-off point when it comes to recalling things."
But how do you get down to only seven words, and make them so simple that even your grandmother could understand them?
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