Confusing marketing with selling is one of the Five Deadly Sins, according to author Jim Lewis. He suggests spending time listening to a customer’s critical business issues initially, because its not as important how much the prospect knows about you and your company, but rather how much the prospect feels you know about him or her and their company...
The economy is at an all time low, and finding new customers is more difficult than ever. Jim Lewis, founder and CEO of Princeton Sales Partners (www.princetonsalespartners.com) helps CEOs recognize five common sales management mistakes that negatively impact financial results.
In his new book Five Deadly Sins CEOs Make in Sales, Lewis describes new, more efficient and more cost effective ways CEOs can meet today’s business challenges.
“Sales theory is useful, but CEOs need to know the hard-nosed blocking and tackling selling strategies and tactics that work,” explains Lewis. “The CEO is the company’s lead sales executive and if the company is missing its revenue targets, it’s the CEO who is ultimately responsible.”
According to Lewis, the five deadly sins CEOs make in sales are:
1. Confusing marketing with selling - Spend time listening to your customer’s critical business issues Initially, its not as important how much the prospect knows about you and your company, but rather how much the prospect feels you know about him or her and their company. While marketing differentiates who you are as a company, selling is a personal dialogue between buyer and seller and an exploration of ways you can help.
2. Failing to understand how buyers buy – Almost every potential buyer has conducted some amount of research on the Internet before they contact your company so they are not usually at the beginning of their deliberations. You need to determine what type of buyer you are dealing with: Innovator, Early Adopter, Early Majority, Late Majority or Laggard.
3. Lacking a repeatable, auditable sales process – Having a benchmark against which to compare different situations and a common sales process language will give you an enormous advantage. When salespeople are required to document sales calls following a structured format, companies can consistently validate buyer intent and gain an understanding of buyer need.
4. Relying on technology to forecast revenue – Companies need to track whether a prospect or customer has told them about an important business issue and at what stage in the buying process they are in, rather than merely tracking sales activity.
5. Promoting star athletes to head coach – Not all top sales performers are cut out to be managers. Great sales people often need to be trained to develop their managerial talents in order to become great coaches.
“Whether you are the CEO of a small company with only one salesperson or you manage thousands, it's very likely that you have committed at least one of the sins described in the book,” explains Lewis.
Five Deadly Sins CEOs Make in Sales is designed to help CEOs understand why their sales organization is not generating more revenue. It helps establish a common language and approach to seeking, nurturing and closing business with new clients, shorten the time it takes new sales people to become productive, qualify and disqualify opportunities faster and more accurately, shorten the total length of the sales cycle and reduce discounting though improved negotiations.
For more information, visit www.princetonsalespartners.com.
A former CEO and global sales and marketing executive, Lewis has more than 25 years of experience managing high-profile companies and has served in executive positions in more than 40 countries. An expert on improving sales processes for companies, Lewis founded Princeton Sales Partners after implementing revenue-improving sales processes in his last three companies. He has helped clients in North America, Europe and Asia.