Tag: sales

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

The Future of B2B sales? Make Buying Easy.

What I Learnt Today, Sales 0

Eric Gervet and Steffen Oder authored a report for A T Kearney on The Future of B2B sales. “In a survey of 1600 top sales managers and professionals in a diverse cross section of industries from consumer goods and retail to energy and utilities—including businesses that sell in turn to individual consumers and small businesses” in search of support for their hypothesis that B2B sales has fundamentally changed. The write “…almost all will see a massive shift in bargaining power toward their customers, driven by Internet-fueled market transparency and globalization. all sorts of disintermediation and reintermediation have redefined products and services and reconfigured entire value chains—routinely leading to new entrants and substitutes.”

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Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Selling your “Promised Land” to your Sales Team

What I Learnt Today, Sales 0

Andy Raskin, the Guru of storytelling in the business context has written some of the most educative articles on the subject. I have had the opportunity in experiencing his presentation of “The Promised Land” narrative at the Drift Hypergrowth Conference at SFO last September. On the back of his Greatest Sales Deck article, where he exemplified the Zuorapitch deck, he wrote how it is critical to get buy in from the sales team before the narrative can be taken public. Never assume it is the lone job of the founder or the top management team to take the brand story to the market. 

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Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

‘Look at it backward’ – Secret of Drift’s success as told by David Cancel

What I Learnt Today, Sales 0

David Cancel wrote an article for Inc where he revealed the ‘simple lesson from Charlie Munger’ that helped Drift hit 8 figure revenue.

This was truly counterintuitive – at least when Charlie Munger started applying it to Berkshire Hathaway investment philosophy. For starters it was the outlook. The ability to have a contrarian view to a situation. David quotes Munger from the book Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger:

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Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Discovery Calls : Understanding your customer is the key to successful transactions

What I Learnt Today, Sales 0
Key to understanding is the ability to ask appropriate questions and listen for the answers

Sharon Drew Morgen wrote about her idea of Facilitative questions. She writes : “Decades ago I had an idea that questions could be vehicles to facilitate change in addition to eliciting answers. ……Here’s the big idea: using questions directed to help Others efficiently recognize their own route to Excellence, and change as appropriate vs. using questions to seek answers that benefit the Asker. This shift in focus alone creates an automatic trust.”

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Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

It is not sales methodologies, but deep understanding of customers ‘situation’ that sells.

What I Learnt Today, Sales 0

A few weeks back Bob Apollo (the founder of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the leading UK-based B2B value-selling consultancy) wrote an insightful article in LinkedIn – about sales methodologies and simple practicality. Sales in a B2B scenario is a value transaction process. For the sales person (vendor) to offer value to the prospect (customer) the core is to figure the real pain (need) and offer an optimal solution. Bob terms this – situational selling and goes on to explain – ‘…It recognises that there is no such thing as a “standard” sales situation and that, therefore, there can be no one universally perfect approach’. 

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