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Top 50 Sales Blogs
MXL's SalesNote makes
TSW's Top 50 Blog List
Global sales resource site Top Sales World has recognized MXL Partners founder Michael Griego's SalesNote Blog on their list of Top 50 Sales Blogs for 2012-2013.
Using a team of independent researchers, Jonathan Farrington of TopSalesWorld.com says "We don't know how many of the 500 million blogs on the internet are sales and marketing related. We compiled what we believe are the best fifty from the ones we know."
The criteria we used to benchmark each blog was:
- Quality of the written word, including use of grammar, punctuation and originality
- Ability to educate, entertain, or give something back rather than "pitching" continually
- Popularity, visitor numbers
- Social media exposure: Tweets, LinkedIn/Facebook/ Google+ promotion
- Blog design, cosmetic appearance
- Finally, regularity of posts.
Farrington says "We use the same team of researchers that we hired to carry out the "Top Sales World Influencers" exercise, and may we take this opportunity to thank them for yet another superb job."
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New 2013 2nd Edition!
42 Rules to Increase Sales Effectiveness
by Michael Griego  |
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Sales Messaging Madness 
In traveling to Asia Pacific, Europe and throughout North America, we work with sales teams with various approaches to effective sales messaging.
Some teams use extensive but tired scripts to deal with prospecting and getting past gatekeepers. Some organizations use messaging focused heavily on product feature sets and customer benefits. Other teams simply leave it up to the sales rep and their own good judgment per the selling situation.
Consequently, the result is a hodgepodge of sales messaging effectiveness. In fact, it is sales messaging madness.
Best practices today in effective sales messaging - anywhere in the world by the way - involve the following:
- Short & Long Elevator Speech - Salespeople need a crisp but well crafted "elevator speech." No less than 20 seconds; no more than 40 seconds. The framework is modular for any environment, fully natural, not canned. An excellent elevator speech (pitch) contains content geared specifically to trigger a response from the customer/prospect and is made up of components that can be interchangeably used anywhere.
- Value Statements - Who you are, What you do, How you do it, Where you've done it, Why they care. There is a series of questions that you can address in a 1 to 2 minute conversation that highlights what your business provides to customers. The flexible mastery of this information is crucial for all salespeople. Not to be confused with the elevator speech.
- Customer Talk Tracks - Knowing market trends that impact your customer audience (by title), as well as their business objectives and specific challenges they face make up a calculated "talk track" that gives salespeople confident guidance in all conversations. So-called Challenger reps don't know everything - they just know talking points really well.
- Executive Whiteboard - Great salespeople paint verbal pictures and can literally draw a powerful storyboard flowing with compelling logic and simple depiction of the customer's current dilemma and potential rescue. A great Whiteboard is a powerful interactive tool for excellent sales discovery.
Is your sales messaging sane?
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Top 10 Sales Messaging Problems
Here's a summary listing of MXL's Top 10 Sales Messaging Problems. They are common and they are the fault of salespeople, sales management, marketing and sales departments.
They need not be deadly but can be tied to ineffective selling efforts in large and small enterprises. Rate yourself or rate your sales team. These are traps, habits and ruts to which even experienced salespeople succumb.
Top 10 Messaging Problems:
1. Random Sales Messaging
2. Meandering Sales Conversations
3. Sales/Marketing Speak
4. Too Many Questions
5. Poor Listening Skills
6. Incorrect Handling of Objections
7. Too Much Focus on Product
8. Too Much Talking by Salesperson
9. Reactive Sales Questioning
10. Insufficient Knowledge of Customer Problems
How goes your messaging?
More...
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Rule #3 - It's Not About Your Product
...While we've learned in Rule 2 that "It's not about you," I can tell you with assurance that to be effective in sales, it's also not about your products.
You might be saying, "But my product really is helpful for businesses and streamlines operations while cutting costs, and it comes in blue." This may all be true, but it's really beside the point. This is one of the toughest lessons for us salespeople to learn.
Certainly we need to know and understand our products and services, as well as articulate the benefits and value they bring to our prospects and customers. But as we will discuss further in Rule 4, our customers have far deeper concerns that are either on the surface clear for all to see, or hidden or even stuffed beneath layers of covering.
Of course our products may help and come to the rescue, fixing issues of which our customers were perhaps not fully aware. Again, while not irrelevant, they are only props within a scene in a bigger play. Until we recognize that, we will consistently fall into a trap of focusing our conversations too much on our great products and services, to the detriment of fully providing problem-solving solutions to our customers....
Do you speak about your products too much and too soon?
Get the Book...
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 Phil Jackson on Sales Coaching
"I think the most important thing about coaching is that you have to have a sense of confidence about what you're doing. You have to be a salesman and you have to get your players, particularly your leaders, to believe in what you're trying to accomplish."
- Phil Jackson, former NBA Head Coach |
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