Top Tips 

……….to help you to maximize sales profitability by using a just-in-time approach 

- Don’t waste selling time by compiling long lists of prospects; much of it will be out of date by the time you use it!

- Create a short prospect list each week, then use it that week

- If you have a large database don’t waste time updating the whole thing; update it as you prospect
- Think just-in-time for your clients as well; prospects forget you very quickly so there is little point in speaking to them a year before they have a need.

J - is for “just-in-time” is a concept used in manufacturing and retailing whereby material is brought in just-in-time rather than held as stock just-in-case. By buying in raw materials a matter of hours before they are needed on the production line a producer can save themselves from tying up capital, they need less storage space, they suffer less shrinkage and they don’t end up with obsolete components. A retailer using just-in-time buys in sale stock on a daily basis, again saving on storage and shrinkage but also avoiding ending up with large amounts of perishable stock past its sell-by-date or out of season.
You can use the same concept with your prospect list or sales database. Spending a lot of time compiling a sales prospecting list seems like a sound investment (which is why a lot of companies employ contractors to generate enormous lists of prospects for them) but in the modern world a large proportion of the information is, past its ‘best before’ date by the time you come to use it; either the prospect organizations has been bought, sold or changed its name, or the contact name has been promoted, headhunted or made redundant or the company has gone bust!
The usual response to this is to carry out a thorough stock take of the database….to employ someone (sometimes the salespeople who really should be out selling!) to “clean the database”. These people then go through the entire bank of information, calling the prospect companies and trying to update every single item of information that is held there.
Sadly it’s like painting the Forth bridge….by the time they get to Z the As are out of date again!
A better approach is to simply make the sales calls and update the database as you go, or simply throw out the database and generate a new one but do it on a just-in-time way rather than as a project in its own right. Or you could use the ‘one click business leads’ service from Sales Researcher; This is a business lead generation service they provide from news alerts about organisations which are growing, expanding, relocating, making bumper profits etc. They are now instantly actionable because they include the email addresses and phone details for the key decision makers.  This allows you to be instantly proactive for any opportunity you see, with all the contact details at your fingertips, and guaranteed up-to-date not past their sell-by-date.
By staying active within the Business Information world you can be aware of the likely and planned evolutions in the marketplace and by judicious use of this information, you can leverage this to your advantage. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com

Top Tips

• Look at all the information available to you about your customer’s industry and pick the gems to pass on to the customer
• “Information” includes knowledge of your existence; remind the customer that you are there and thinking of him/her
• Before you send that communication check what information you have accidentally hidden in it, loike that you cant spell, and don’t cheque yore emails.
• Before you send that communication check that the information you have about the customer is also complete and up to date

Information is the lifeblood of business to business sales and knowledge is power. Think of the information that your organisation needs in order to successfully make sales in its marketplace.  

Information about the market; is it on the up or on the wane? Is it an emerging market that is expanding or a mature market that is relatively static or even a declining market that is retracting? Knowing this will ensure that you minimise the likelihood of surprises and can plan your own big picture business strategy accordingly, as well as your sales strategy for the whole market and for individual customers.

Information about the technology; is it developing and creating obsolescent product rapidly, is it ripe for technological advances? Is your product or service following upstream technological advances or leading downstream technological support? Being in possession of this information will allow you to invest in R&D and to initiate and manage appropriate Joint Ventures for mutual sales advantage.

Information about your competitors; what are they doing that will impact on your sales activities and results? Where are they strong and where are they weak? What is their pricing strategy and their value proposition and how does this affect you and your accounts. This will allow you to either play keep-up or to get smart and try to outfox them by getting there first by anticipating their next action. 

Information about your clients themselves; what are their aspirations? How are your clients doing financially; are they potentially a safe bet or a bad debt? This will help you to manage cash flow and credit control (‘a sale ain’t worth nothing til its paid for’)

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com

Top Tips

• If you’ve ever lost a sale in mid pipeline that means you can also win a sale in someone else’s mid pipeline…get out there and try!
• Don’t just ask your customers for feedback; ask the ones who didn’t buy, “Why not?”…it’s never too late.
• The New Year is a great time for resolutions; many customers are looking for a change…. keep in touch with your paying customers.
• The New Year is a great time for resolutions; many customers are looking for a change… get in touch with your competitor’s customers.

oping that a prospect will turn into a customer is rather like hoping that someone will fall in love with you and, as the song says, it won’t work.  You’ve got to show them that you care.  How? Well there isn’t much point in continuing to follow the advice of the song and changing your hairstyle, but you can show the prospective customer that you care by various other actions:

• Simply getting in touch shows that you care and the more personalised the contact the more caring it appears, so a phone call is a really good way to show that you care about the prospect
• Having something to say when you get through shows that you care; not just an “are you ready to buy yet”, as that looks as if you care more about your wallet than the customer, but an “I-saw-this-and-thought-of-you” message that is of interest and value to the prospective customer.
• Having something to “give” them also shows that you care; whether it is a copy of a report that relates to their product or market, a cutting or news snippet relating to their competitors or a “heads up” about something you have heard.  The great advantage of this type of “gift” is that it is usually a sight cheaper than offering a discount or a free sample or trial.

Hidden gems may also be lurking in your prospect list; yes, I accept that the fact that they are “hidden gems” means that you can’t see them so you might discard them as of little or no value but again this is an area where having that caring contact with the prospect can turn up the hidden gems simply by virtue of casual comment.

A salesperson for an HR consultancy had been prospecting to an oil and gas exploration company for several months, trying to get a foot in the door with some training or recruitment work.  In the course of a regular contact the buying manager mentioned that he was severely busy, as he had to go on a global tour for three months.  The salesman casually asked who was going to be doing the annual appraisals that were coming up, “no one” was the answer.  “Can we do them for you whilst you are away?” the salesman asked…. It was the beginning of a long and profitable relationship.

Hijacking the sales process is something that doesn’t always work but it is always worth giving it a try.  Many organisations have quite slow and bureaucratic sales processes, with a series of hurdles to jump, whether they are submissions of tender documents or meetings with people in the “chain of command”.  This is a pain when you are trying to break into a new client and an even bigger pain when you are already a supplier; think however how much more of a pain it is to the poor line manager who has a need for a product or service and has to wait interminably while a process is followed…

A line manager in a management consultancy had offered a guy a project related job and put in the relevant documents to the HR and IT teams.  The needs of the project dictated that the guy start ASAP but when he arrived the IT people hadn’t completed the purchase of a desktop PC for him.  The line manager was so frustrated at having a valuable worker sitting idle that he went to a local shop and bought a PC over the counter on his company credit card!

There are fundamentally two ways to hijack the process;

• Dive-in in the middle of the process and offer something better, cheaper or different to the current shortlist

• Cut through the process by going to the most influential person in the process and convincing him or her that you are the supplier they most need

Which of these you choose to use is of course, dependent on the circumstances but both have worked and continue to do so because either way you….

Help people to do their job faster, more cost effectively or better.

By staying active within the Business Information world you can be aware of the likely and planned purchases in the marketplace and by judicious use of this information, you can leverage this to your advantage.

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com

Top Tips

• Don’t procrastinate make a sales call NOW!
• Grab every little five minute wait time during your day to make a sales call
• Never switch off looking for subliminal sales opportunities, then….
• When you become aware of an opportunity, grab it, with both hands, immediately.

No matter how much planning you do, no matter how much research you gather, no matter how many gadgets and gizmos you possess, the only way you make sales is by getting in touch with prospects, generating rapport and giving it your best shot.  It isn’t just that there is a time for planning and a time for doing, it is also about making and taking time for doing every day.

You can’t afford to wait until the product is made before you start to sell it; what if the guys in market research got it wrong and there is no market for the product?  Taiichi Ohno, the “inventor” of the concept of The 7(+1) Wastes, identified two of the primary areas of waste in industry as overproduction and overstocked inventories.  Both of these link to creating and holding stocks that aren’t sold…these aren’t assets, they’re liabilities! You need to be out there talking direct to customers long before the product is gathering dust in a warehouse.

This goes for services too; the best “problem” to have is the one where you walk out of the client’s office with the ink drying on the contract and think to yourself, “Gosh, we are going to have to move fast to put this together in time!”  You may be in a role where you are responsible for the operational delivery of the service as well as the sale, in which case this is your problem, if not it is the role of someone else in your organisation; so long as the two of you are communicating there is no reason why this Just-In-Time approach will cause a problem.

Grab every opportunity to make sales calls.  A sales call doesn’t have to be an hour long affair; two or three minutes is often more than enough, so make sure that every day you have to hand (wherever you are) the ability to make a half dozen sales calls.  The prospect won’t know that you are in the car park of his competitor, if you use text or mobile email the prospect won’t know that you are on the train!  By grabbing every 5 or 10 minute waiting time in each day you can make an extra 30 or 40 sales calls a week.

I was running a sales training workshop in a hotel in Leicestershire; I popped into the gents during the morning coffee break, and could hear a candidate in one of the stalls talking on his mobile.  He was making a sales call from the loo!

Get into the habit of actively looking for sales opportunities in everything you see and hear. Then grab every opportunity that you spot.  What are we talking about? Here are some real life examples.

The local Basingstoke newspaper carried the story that Chas. A. Blatchford and Sons, manufacturer of traditional prosthetic limbs, had just bought a competitor and was moving into the competitor’s area of strength, modern “beachwear” prosthetics.  The woodworking and metal working shops would be phased out over the next six months as the company invested in plastic and electronics.  An outplacement consultancy saw the news item and contacted Blatchford’s personnel manager and won a contract to support the craftsmen who were being made redundant.

A salesman was travelling in the train home one evening but hadn’t picked up the evening paper.  Opposite him was a gent reading the London Evening Standard.  The lead story on the front page was all about a large overseas defence contract being awarded to a UK company and the beneficial effect this would have protecting jobs.  On the gent’s lapel was a pin bearing the logo of the lucky UK defence manufacturer, the salesman offered his congratulations and the two struck up a conversation, the salesman offered his business card and was given one in return.  He called the next day, met the following week and got a supply contract about three months later.

By staying active within the Business Information world you can be aware of the likely and planned evolutions in the marketplace and by judicious use of this information, you can leverage this to your advantage. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com

Top Tips

• Check that your clients are solvent before, during and after you sign a deal
• A poor payment structure can render a deal worthless; negotiate as fast payment as possible
• ‘Contracts’ are great if you can afford to enforce them; money in the bank is safer

inancial information; company reports and accounts and  credit ratings may seem less important to you than to the accounts department but claw-back on commission payments or missed bonuses after all the work will hurt you more than the accountant!

Four ways of using financial information to protect your income are;

1.     Looking at client’s payment history.

2.     Looking into a prospect’s credit rating.

3.     Ascertaining who really controls the budget and payment sign off and

4.     Ascertaining the size of the budget.

1.     Take a look at the payment history of your clients; obviously different sectors have different ‘norms’~ retail is generally payment on delivery/collection, whereas many service businesses don’t invoice until the end of the calendar month and then get paid in 30 or 60 days.  Even assuming a ‘good’ payment history this can leave the supplier with a minimum 90-day deficit to fund.  Challenge the norms in a creative way.  Ask for payment or partial payment upfront in return for a small discount; this is especially effective with clients who usually pay late.

2.     Keep a constant check on clients’ credit ratings; there have been many examples of suppliers delivering to a client for 80 or 90 days when the clients have already shown themselves to be non-creditworthy. Soldiering on in hope that things will improve is a fine way to commit commercial suicide.

3.     With new clients (or existing clients going through re-organisations) ensure that you keep a close eye on the authority element of the MAN mnemonic; there is little point in delivering half the service for Manager X only to be told that Manager Y is actually the authorised signatory.  You may be able to force the client to pay eventually but by that time the relationship will be too strained and your costs too high to make the current or future work worthwhile.

4.     Make sure that both you and the client are in accord over the size of the budget for your goods or services.  This may sound too obvious but so often everyone concentrates on the unit price rather than the overall cost; consultancy at £XXX per day rather than how many days at £XXX equals the total project cost being £YYYYY.  There are examples of this issue cutting both ways; think of all those big Government contracts where the project is costing the taxpayer 10 times the estimated cost due to overrun (to the benefit of the supplier) or the cases where the supplier agrees a low unit price on the assumption of high volume but then actually gets only 15% of the anticipated volume and therefore loses out.

Forecasting and Firming what is in the pipeline is another important way to improve your sales productivity.  A genuine forecast (rather than a wistful hope) of the time that pieces of business in the pipeline will reach maturity will help you to identify the most productive use of your time and effort.  Where you have a piece of business in the pipeline but it is moving slowly towards being contracted look for ways of speeding it up (let’s face it lots of stuff that is in the pipeline disappears due to circumstances outside your control, so if you can chivvy it along this will stop it from evaporating).  You can chivvy by actually asking for the contract to be signed up, by creating a deadline for the quoted price, by offering a guaranteed delivery date or time in return for a firm booking or possibly by offering a small discount in return for a firm booking.

Foxing the opposition may sound like an odd way to improve your sales productivity but it can be a valuable strategic tool.  As a supplier you may be convinced that you have no hope of breaking into your competitor’s biggest account, but if you consistently try, you keep the competitor busy fighting you, this takes them time and energy that they may otherwise use to attack your key accounts.  You never know, you might even be successful and actually win business with the prospect!

By staying active within the Business Information world you can be aware of the likely and planned evolutions in the marketplace and by judicious use of this information, you can leverage this to your advantage. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com

Top Tips

• Search for ways to reduce your “admin” time. You need every available minute to think, plan and sell.
• If you haven’t yet got a communication plan, in writing, write one within a week.
• When was the last time you actively sought out a new prospect? If it was over a week ago, do it today.

stablish a communication plan.  There is an adage; Do you plan to fail or fail to plan? This is just as true in sales as it is in house building or war.  You probably have a sales plan already; something that lays out the target revenue generated per month but you also need a communication plan that will help you to generate and sustain those figures. If you have a communication plan you know what you should be doing, you can measure the effect it has and you can learn from what happens.  If you have no plan then certain things or certain clients just get forgotten, you have no idea what is working or why and you find that the rest of your life gets overtaken by events.

A sales communication plan doesn’t have to take ages to produce and you certainly don’t need to write it by the kilo; assuming that you have a contact list it can be as simple as a one hour and one sheet of A4 job.

Every day do something Effective is a good strategy for your sales communication plan.

• You may plan to communicate with all your customers every day; I know one salesman who does just this with a twitter campaign; he tweets about 8 times every day and reports that it generates between 10 and 12% of his profitable sales.
• Alternatively you may plan to communicate with a given set of customers each day, working your way through your contact list over a given period.
• You could alternate activities; on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I’ll send out an update, working through 10 contacts per day, whilst on Tuesdays and Thursdays I’ll search for and add three new prospects to the contact list.
• You may choose to segment your contact list so that you send different communications to different contacts; the segmentation may be on grounds of relationship (eg contacts who are currently buying get a different message to those that are “dormant”) or it could be on grounds of client characteristics (eg not-for-profit contacts get a different message to commercial contacts)

Whilst you plan to do something effective every day you also need to factor in some rolling actions for weekly or monthly inclusion.

• Regular “topping-up” of the contact list; actively seeking out new prospects so that your contact list isn’t slowly contracting
• Regular cleaning of the contact list (at home do you still get marketing and sales letters addressed to the people you bought the house from 5 years ago? What image does that give you of the organisation that sent the letter?)
• Regular general update messages or a newsletter

Regular and planned activity doesn’t stop you from reacting to sales signals, it helps you to manage those reactions; you can still respond to a “walk in” prospect and seize that opportunity but you will also find that having and working a communication plan keeps you on the boil rather than hitting the ‘feast and famine’ cycle that can come when you reach the end of a customer project and realise that you have let the pipeline run dry.

Email…is it worth the paper it isn’t printed on? Within your communication plan also consider the media that will be most effective.  80% of email is reckoned to be spam and spam filters are notoriously fickle; even a valued client who hangs on your every word can discover that their spam filter is cutting out your communications.  Use email but also consider the other options;

• Snail mail
• SMS
• Tweets
• Phone calls
• Website updates

Entice the contact” is a good way of thinking about the actual content of your individual communications; you need to have a message to get across to the contact and it has to be a bit more interesting than either “Can I have an order” or “I’m still alive”.  A snippet of information that is relevant to the contact is always going to be interesting enough for them to read; an update about their marketplace or clients, a bit of intelligence about their competitors, a quote from an influential person in their sphere of interest, an opinion of their organisation from a respected pundit.

By staying active within the Business Information world you can be aware of the likely and planned evolutions in the marketplace and by judicious use of this information, you can leverage this to your advantage.  Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com

Hi Everyone,

The new Sales Researcher site is now full operational. Visit us at http://www.salesresearcher.com/

More Blog posts to come soon along with letter E in our A-Z series.

Top tips:

1. If you haven’t got an elevator pitch already, produce one today.

2. If you already have an elevator pitch check it today and ensure it is no longer than 50 seconds

3. Make sure your elevator pitch doesn’t sound like a sales pitch

4. Have different pitches ready for different situations

evelop Elevator Pitches. You know what an elevator pitch is even if, being in Britain, the word elevator looks a bit out of place.  You need not only to develop a standard elevator pitch for the traditional face-to-face meeting, but also to develop the concept of the elevator pitch to take advantage of the communications opportunities available to you in the 21^st Century.

The traditional elevator pitch, which has been around since the mid 1980s, is a 20 second to 2 minute ‘sell’ that aims to convince a prospect that they want to know more.  As such it has to be unique to you (or your product/service).

A saleswoman, introduced to a prospect at a business seminar, answered the question “And what do you do?” with a smooth, prepared and comprehensive elevator pitch.  The prospect fixed her with a look and said, “I’ve heard pretty much the same story from four people already this morning, what makes you different?”

The saleswoman was floored, the moment gone, the prospect unconverted and any chance of a sale lost.

You also have to hit the right note between grabbing their attention and telling them so much that you talk yourself out of the sale.  It is fair to say that in the 2010s two minutes is just too long.  Go for something nearer 45 seconds.

There are three things a successful elevator pitch needs;

• Hook-something that makes the listener want to listen to the next 40 seconds!
• Story-the content that you want to get across to the listener; this could be about you, if you are the ‘product’, it could be about the team; if the team is the USP of your proposition or it could be about the unique benefits offered by your product or service.  You must deliver this with passion; if you aren’t able to enthuse about your subject, why the heck should you expect your prospect to?
• Request- you have to finish on a strong note; go for a request, be it a business card, a follow up meeting request or even a request for an order.

You also need to work on your modern versions of the hook of the elevator pitch: the Tweet, the Linked In update, the voicemail message and the subject line of an email. Remember that the purpose of the hook is to make the listener want to listen for the rest of your pitch. Here are two more Ds to help you improve your hook:

Don’t sound like a salesperson. A sure fire way to fail in this purpose is to sound like a stereotypical salesperson.  You need to be hooking the listener with something to their benefit, not yours, about their needs, not about your offering.

Differentiate with Information. One way to differentiate your elevator pitch is to use information that is not about your product or service but is about the prospect and their business.  For example; if you are talking to a potential buyer from say, Harley-Davidson, and you can tell them that their competitor, Ducati, just improved their performance…by using your service or product, this will undoubtedly be of interest.

Another way to differentiate with information is to simply share industry information that will be of direct interest to the prospect by virtue of being relevant.  For example, if you are contacting a prospect in Birmingham City Council and you can give the person an update on the legal challenge between Bristol City Council and UNISON over pensions, the prospect will almost certainly want to read/listen to your message.

Different situations call for different pitches. If you meet someone at an industry exhibition and they are wearing a badge with their name title and company on it, you probably wouldn’t use the same pitch as you would if you met someone at the golf club.  Think about how you can adapt the basic formula of hook, story, request to suit different situations.  If you don’t, you’ll either say the wrong thing or say nothing at all!

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com

Top tips

• Use all available and appropriate media; do something today, write, email, fax, phone, SMS, tweet or link in.
• Make a connection plan that covers all your contacts at least once a month
• Set aside a scheduled time each day or week just for connecting

onnectivity increases conversions. There is a quotation that “If you invent a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door”.  It’s rubbish.  How will the world know that you have built a better mousetrap?  How will they know how to find you?  How will they know what your mousetrap costs? Why would people with no mouse problem want a mousetrap?

If you want to successfully sell you have to connect with prospective buyers, and connecting is a two way process.  There is an acronym used in marketing which is AIDA.  The A stands for Awareness (the IDA will be covered in later releases of this series).  You have to make the customer Aware of your existence and of the existence of your products or services.  You have to then keep them aware; in the 21^st Century people are exposed to more information in a single Sunday paper than a 17^th Century landowner would be likely to read in his entire adult life.  Large amounts of the information we see and hear each day simply don’t stick; they are forgotten within a short period.  Consequently you have to keep drip-feeding people with messages in order to remain close to the surface of their conscious memory. Why do you want to be close to the surface of conscious memory?  Because again, in the 21^st Century the pace of life is fast; when a manager discovers a need he or she wants to fulfil that need quickly.  When a manager need a trainer, if the first words that pop into his or her mind are “Rus Slater of coach –and-courses.com” the manager doesn’t need to google or look in their business card index for a potential supplier.  The supplier who comes to mind first is probably the one they’ll call.

So how do you connect with prospects and customers? The options range from the traditional to the cutting edge and from the glaringly obvious to the subtle.

• You can invite them to Corporate hospitality such as the races or the rugby.
• You can entertain them on a One to One basis for a meal or a drink or golf.
• You can Network with them at the meetings of any trade associations or bodies that are relevant to both of you.
• You can regularly send them relevant News cuttings that are of value to them.
• You can deliberately meet them at Exhibitions and Expos where you or they are running a stand.
• You can call them to Catch up with what is happening in their life (Note here that you want to find about them NOT tell them about you; if they declare an infestation of mice then obviously you can tell them about your invention, but avoid just calling on the pretext of telling them your news.)
• You can Tweet, Facebook, Link In

If you want to continue to sell to customers you have to stay connected to them, so you will probably need to use a variety of these approaches over the course of the year with a variety of customers and prospects.  This connectivity increases the Awareness of you and your organisation, the next stage in AIDA is the ‘I’ which stands for Interest and in this instance it is a double ended Interest;

1.      You need to take an interest in them and their current situation in order to find out whether there is any value in trying….

2.      to create an interest in your product or service

Always remember to do Number 1 first; otherwise you are telling someone something they have no interest in and that is boring!

By staying active within the Business Information world you can be aware of the likely and planned evolutions in the marketplace and by judicious use of this information, you can leverage this to your advantage.

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com



1. Top tips

• Find out about the individual buyer at your client; not just their name and job title but what makes them tick.
• Cultivate other contacts within the client; they are a source of valuable information for you; this will allow you to beat the competition when an opportunity arises.
• Stay abreast of industry sector developments; this allows you to anticipate rather than react.

is for ‘Buyers and Businesses Evolve’. No, the nice people at Sales Researcher haven’t lost their marbles and aren’t suggesting that people are developing gills or webbed feet.  But both buyers and business evolve, nothing stays the same for long in the world of commerce and industry and business information can help you to stay ahead.

Buyers evolve in several ways; the organisations changes the person who buys from you, or the buyer changes his or her wants and desires for your type of product or service.  You need to keep abreast of personnel changes at the client or prospective client.  If an organisation announces a change of personnel there is a sales opportunity; new people may have no loyalty to past suppliers so they may be open to change, or they may actively want to change.  By you being aware of this opportunity you can tap directly into this opportunity with a ‘welcome’ message and an offer.  Incumbent buyers also evolve in their wants and desires from the products or services they buy.  This can be as straightforward as ‘we are having a cost cutting review and need less expensive products’ to ‘we have won a big contract and will need to increase our intake’ through to ‘I personally have changed my attitude in life and now want more ethical or environmental products’

Or even….

I had been courting a buyer in a potentially large and lucrative account for over a year to no avail; it seemed that he just didn’t like me.  I started to research and send him clippings from the ‘movers and shakers’ columns, announcements that told of people in his field moving to new jobs and new employers, the market at the time was buoyant and there was so much migration going on I was able to send him a couple each week.  After about four months I read an article that he himself had just moved.  Like a flash I got in touch with his replacement and won a small pilot contract.  I also sent him a ‘Congratulations’ card…..to which I received for the first time ever an invitation to bid!

Buyers also have access to an increasing wealth of information online and are taking a much more flexible view of the ways and timescales in which they want to buy. Doing a solid sales pitch to one person is no longer enough to secure new or existing business. Interspersing your infrequent sales pitches with real help for a customer buying team can work brilliantly though. You need to understand what are your buyers critical priorities, and what else do they feel they need to know when making buying decisions. What knock-on issues are they and their team considering? You also need to establish connections across the team….everyone in the team counts, even the person who seems to be low down the pecking order.  By including these people in your Business Information strategy you can influence the people who can influence the buying the decision.

People don’t want just to be sold to any more, they want to make right buying decisions. Giving them valuable information that shows you understand their challenges and that you have expertise that can help is vitally important.

Businesses evolve too, P&O Ferries ply the English Channel and there is nothing pacific or oriental about that stretch of water.  British Gas supplies electricity, Norwich Union is no longer a Union and isn’t confined to Norwich (Yes, they changed their name to Aviva, and think how many sales people in design agencies, printers, advertising firms and sign writers hit their targets on the back of that evolution [even Paul Whitehouse’s agent!)

By staying active within the Business Information world you can be aware of the likely and planned evolutions in the marketplace and by judicious use of this information, you can leverage this to your advantage. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity. 

Sales Researcher actively seeks out sector specific intelligence for you to tap into and use to generate more and better sales productivity.  

Ray Murphy of Sales Researcher can be contacted at ray.murphy@salesresearcher.com or visit our website at www.salesresearcher.com