10 Sales Job Interviewing Tips for Losers

1.) Tell company management how proud you are of not having killer instincts

2.) Discuss how your not the type to make a commitment

3.) Tell the sales manager that your not interested in earning more money or better still that you’ve no interest in money

4.) Tell interviewer how you kept the laptop of your last employer

5.) Lose control of your emotions and show anger

6.) Discuss how you have no interest in networking

7.) Make tons of excuses for lack of results

8.) Tell them how you really like working from home because you have other things to do

9.) Discuss how you trust all prospects to do what they tell you they will do

10.) Tell the sales manager about your lack of personal goals

Believe or not, I recently heard that a guy actually got a sales job by saying most of these things – who knew?

Sell with Happy/Sad Stories

Sounds simple enough but why don’t more sales professionals tell prospects about existing customers that overcame this or that problem with his/her products/services? Sure, they may mention that x company purchased xx but they don’t go into the various reasons with a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  I think the reason that some sales people don’t tell a good story is because they are not trained to do so and in some cases it is just plain lack of preparation.

While many companies have sales toolboxes for the sales team with success stories and case studies in it, some sales people will gloss over them and forget the story. Some ways a sales manager can help is to continually review one or two past and present wins at each sales meeting and correlate them to some existing pipeline opportunities. Have one of the team members who is good at story telling role play with another member and get a good flow going. Have everyone make comments. This will keep fresh in the teams minds the success stories and how to use them in different situations. In addition, you can have a customer focused technical type attend a sales meeting monthly to discuss difficult problems and how they helped win the deals. Since not all success stories are in the sales tool box, sales people can also do research on their own with technical teams prior to making a sales call or presentation to see if they worked on a similar vertical issue in the past and see how it was overcome.

Remember in sales people love stories if it’s relevant to their situation. If the story is a good one it will go a long way towards getting the prospect to want that to happen to them, if it’s a bad story they will want to make sure it does not happen to them.

Good selling!

 

Google’s new tool called “Knol”

Here’s a heads-up on a new tool from Google – it’s called “knol” and it will compete with Wikipedia communal encyclopaedia. It allows anyone to provide information about any and every topic.

You can now write about a subject that your knowledgeable about and add it with KNOL.
The knol pages will get search rankings to reflect their usefulness. Knols will also come with tools that readers can use to rate the information, add comments, suggest edits or additional content.

Revenue from any adverts on a knol page will be shared with its author.

Check it out!

SALESFORCE.COM something good coming…

LISTEN UP SALES EXECUTIVES – Will you love tomorrow’s Salesforce.com news?

Salesforce.com will announce a new offering tomorrow called “Salesforce to Salesforce” (S2S). The service offering facilitates the sharing of data between companies that use Salesforce. There are a number of ways that businesses can benefit from the new service – for sales it will allow you to capture data, cross-pollinate for leads that can be distributed to your channel. Hopefully, they won’t make any of the mistakes that Facebook made with Beacon. S2S is a very different product, but coming just days after the negative backlash that Beacon received, Salesforce will have to make sure it’s PR firm works overtime on positivity and the differences.

In my opinion, this goes way beyond CRM and something that can drive revenue for Salesforce and it’s constituency. We will be hearing a lot more about in the coming months. I expect a number of SaaS providers will be watching Salesforce to see how well they do.

Let me know your thoughts!

 

How to lose your best sales person

The number one way to lose your best salesperson is to offer them the job of sales manager without any sales management/leadership training. If you’ve familiar with any of my earlier posts or my podcast on the subject, you know this is one of my pet peeves.

It’s a fact that a very high percentage of first time sales managers fail miserably within the first six months on the job. Yet, companies continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. DAH!!! This is not rocket science – stop hitting your executive heads against the wall and help yourselves and your BEST salespeople by getting them training months before they take the position and keep up the training for as long as needed. I’m ranting about this because I’ve just heard about several failures that did not have to happen.

To see why they fail, check out my post titled: “Top 10 Mistakes New Sales Managers Make “

Top 10 Mistakes New Sales Managers Make

1. Not knowing how to coach and evaluate

2. Not stepping out of the sales role as a manager but instead making sales calls with a salesperson and taking over the job of selling to the prospect.

3. Inability to manage time for management tasks including administrative, financial, personnel, sales management & marketing

4. Inability to train sales team

5. Hiring the wrong sales people (no technique developed, no knowledge of what to look for in a good fit)

6. Still trying to be one of the guys with the team

7. Not buying into managements objectives

8. Not getting rid of non-performers in time

9. Not knowing how to manage disruptive and troublesome sales people

10. Not clearly defining goals and measuring results