Sales and Sales Management Blog

October 22, 2008

New E-book by The Top Sales Experts Now Available

The Top Sales Experts group has just released its newest E-book of terrific sales and sales management articles that you can download for FREE at:

http://www.topsalesexperts.com/signUp.php

Stuffed with great articles from more than 50 of the world’s top sales and management trainers and consultants, you’ll find tips, advice, strategies, and techniques that can immediately impact your sales and your income from world class authorities who know how to help you get your production up.

Authors include:

Kevin Eikenberry

Jill Konrath

Colleen Francis

Keith Rosen

Jonathan Farrington

Lee Salz

Kevin Dwyer

Dr. Gregory Stebbins

Linda Richardson

Myself

and dozens more

Head over right now to The Top Sales Experts site and get your copy.  It’s FREE.  It’s packed with material that will help you sell.  And most importantly, it’s going to help you increase your income while strengthening your relationships with your clients and prospects. 

September 7, 2008

Great Tips and a Free Audio Copy of My Referral Selling Book

Would you like a free unabridged audio copy of my bestselling book Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals? Well, you can have one courtesy of Jeb Blount, The Sales Guy. That’s every second of the 4 hours and 18 minutes of the book-and not only do you not pay the Audible cost of $17.95, you don’t pay a penny.

Jeb’s podcast series, The Sales Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips, has arranged for you get a free download of my book in audio form from Audiable.com. Already have the book in hardback or audio form? Would you rather have another book? No problem. You can choose my book or a book by Nido Qubein, Tom Hopkins, Brain Tracey, Steven R. Covey, Harry Beckwith, Zig Zigler, Malcolm Gladwell, Jeffrey Giotmer, Seth Godin, or other top authors.

The best part is you also get great sales tips from Jeb. Hop on over to iTunes, Quick and Dirty Tips, or Sales Gravy, listen to Jeb give you some tips to help you sell and then listen to me tell you how to turn your business into a referral-based business, increase your income substantially, get off the ineffective, discouraging, and never-ending cold calling treadmill, and enjoy your job a whole lot more.

I want to thank Jeb for featuring my book on this offer-and encourage you, whether you get my book, another book, or no book, to head over to Quick and Dirty Tips and improve you sales business.

August 29, 2008

Book Review: Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear, by Dr. Frank Luntz

Imagine knowing the words, ideas, and concepts that influence people to buy, to make a choice, to solve a problem, to commit to your solution. Imagine being able to write or say something that immediately strikes a nerve; that people will remember and act upon. Imagine having the power that moves prospects, coworkers, employees, better yet, your spouse to your point of view.

Few of us in sales and marketing are writers–that is true wordsmiths. Few of us think we have the talent to be. Most of really don’t aspire to be. But all of us yearn to-we must-influence those around us. We must be able to persuade, to move men and women to make choices-to pick up the phone, to exert more effort, to sign the contract, to buy the product, to commit to our goals, our vision, our solution. And most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, are simply tossing darts, hoping that eventually we will hit upon a phrase or a sentence that hits the mark.

Although we may never become a Faulkner or Hemingway, we can learn to use words in ways-or at least we can learn the words–that impact our audience. Instead of writing our typical drivel that hangs together loosely, which we vaguely hope will strike a nerve with someone, we can learn to tighten up our communication by learning what people really react to-and why.

Dr. Frank Luntz has given us a good gulp of these gems. His New York Times best-selling book, Words That Work (Hyperion, 2007), lays out his findings about words, ideas, concepts. Luntz is a linguist that gets it-who can take research and translate it into a format that we simpletons can not only grasp but actually use in our everyday lives.

Certainly, if you’re a political junkie as I am, you’ll love the book for its insights into how politicians influence the electorate. Luntz gives example after example of both the words that have worked and the words that have flopped. But don’t think of Words That Work as just a political book. It is, of course. But it is also a sales book, a marketing book, an everyday life book.

Some have been put off by the fact Luntz is a Republican pollster. If you don’t like his politics, don’t let that stand in your way. He gives positive and negative examples from all political points of view, but more importantly, if you view it as a political book as many have you will miss the message of the book.

If you really want to improve your ability to communicate-whether in marketing, sales, or changing your kid’s minds, you’ll find a great deal of meat in Words That Work. From “The Ten Rules of Effective Language” to corporate and political case studies to understanding what people really care about, Luntz lays out the words, phrases and concepts that influence and change minds and backs them up from his studies with thousands of everyday men and women from across the country.

August 8, 2008

A Few New Web Resources You Should Know About

If you haven’t found these resources yet, they’re worth looking into:

Insightory: Insightory is another in a long line of sites featuring the work of top business thought leaders.  Insightory’s difference is that they have a number of experts from around the world that are not often found on most other sites.  The site has some excellent material.

Sales Training Warehouse: For those from ‘Down Under’ there’s a new site that features sales training material from several top sales experts.  You’ll find coaching, books, training CD’s and more.  The site is new but the offerings will continue to grow.  For non-Aussie training material such as mine, one of the advantages of the site-besides aggregating resources on a single site–is that pricing has been converted from American dollars and the VAT added so you know what you’re going to pay right up front.

Sales Book Awards: My friends Jeb Blount and Jonathan Farrington have decided it is time to do something about recognizing the best sales books.  Their answer?  They created the Sales Book Awards.  You can nominate your favorite sales books for recognition in several categories.  Nomination deadline is Sept 30-so hurry and get your nominations in.

Business Expert Webinars: Another friend, Lee Salz, has created Business Expert Webinars.  Lee has gathered together dozens and dozens of business experts from almost every area of business you can think of to offered one-hour webinars.  Webinars are very reasonably priced at $79.00 each.  Take a look at their offerings-and register for a webinar.

August 4, 2008

Interview with Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales, on His New Book

Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales, has just released The Real Secrets of the Top 20% (Sales Gravy Press, 2008). I interview him about the book and how it will help salespeople increase their effectiveness and their income.

mike-brooks-invterview-revised

The Real Secrets of the Top 20% is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, and all fine bookstores.

July 30, 2008

Interview with NYT Best-selling Author Linda Richardson about Her Newest Book, Perfect Selling

Linda Richardson has released her New York Times best-seller, Perfect Selling. This short, easy to read book deals with her 5-step process to creating a successful sales encounter.

linda-richardson-interview

Perfect Selling (McGraw Hill) is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, and all fine booksellers.

June 21, 2008

Top Sales Experts Releases New Sales E-book

The Top Sales Experts have released a new 139 page e-book with articles by over 50 top sales trainers.

Topics covered range from prospecting to leadership to the sales process to managing sales teams and everything in-between. Authors include Dr. Tony Alessandra, Jill Konrath, Jonathan Farrington, Jeb Blount, Keith Rosen, Wendy Weiss, Dr. Gregory Stebbins, Tim Wackel, Ann Miller, Lee Salz, Kelley Robertson, myself and many others.

I encourage you to click over HERE and download your copy. Over 50 great articles by some of the best minds in the business of sales—and its free. Best yet, when you do download the book, you’ll be automatically registered to receive all future editions of the Top Sales Experts e-books when they come out.

There are a lot of e-books on the market—most of them are quite honestly junk. This is the exception. No matter where you are in your sales career or what sales issues you might be facing, you’ll find numerous articles that will help you sell more, make more money, and get more enjoyment out of your career.

April 15, 2008

Book Recommendation: Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions

Transitioning from Manager to Coach
A Tactical Coaching System for Managers and Executives

“There is no other single activity to boost sales that works better than sales coaching and Keith’s book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, is the best ever written on how to do it well.”
- Brian Tracy, Author, Getting Rich Your Own Way

“Winning in sales is no different than winning in life. If you embrace Keith’s philosophy, you can certainly expect to win in all areas of your life, while making a profound and measurable impact on your salespeople’s performance and attitude.”
- Dr. Denis Waitley, Best Selling Author of The Seeds of Greatness and The Psychology of Winning

Technology has not only changed the way companies sell but the way managers build and develop their team. Even with the right knowledge and resources, they’re usually too bogged down in daily challenges, deadlines, and personal responsibilities to get it all done. As a result, advancing their people takes a back seat to more immediate problems, keeping teams mired in mediocrity.

With a savvy, younger generation to manage and fewer resources to do so, managers have less face time with their staff. As more companies transition to a virtual team environment, it’s essential for managers to learn how to quickly and efficiently coach, develop, motivate and retain their top performers at a distance; over the telephone and via the internet.

The fact is, regardless of experience, most leadership efforts are doomed from the start. Managers lose talented people and maintain an atmosphere of mediocrity not because of a lack of effort but because they lack the coaching acumen and skill set as well as a defined coaching system to leverage each person’s strengths and abilities in order to generate consistent, worthwhile results.

If you’re responsible for coaching or managing anyone, best selling author Keith Rosen will help you make the transition from manager to coach by developing the missing discipline of leadership - executive sales coaching. Most managers have never been trained to manage, let alone coach effectively. In his new book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, Keith delivers a tactical coaching system for managers, business owners, coaches and executives - anyone who wants a proven and powerful method to coach and develop true champions.

Plenty of programs espouse new management and leadership theories for managers, but few show you how to actually coach your people on a daily basis in a way that creates measurable change. Now, you can implement a systematic approach to develop a world class team and achieve the meaningful, long lasting results you want-today.

Tap into the experience of a master coach and learn how to:
• Turn underperformers into super-achievers, fast. (Under 30 days.)
• Attract and retain top talent.
• Motivate their team through the Art of Enrollment™, the new language of leadership.
• Empower their people to solve their own problems and become fully accountable using the L.E.A.D.S. Coaching System™ - rather than being dependent on you.
• Handle difficult people without conflict and determine when to let them go without collateral damage.
• Leverage your personal strengths as well as the hidden talents of your team.
• Eliminate hours of your daily workload so you can focus on the activities that yield the greatest ROI.
• Transition from manager to coach.
• Make the shift from a corporate culture to a coaching culture.

** 72 HOUR BOOK EVENT ENDS THURSDAY**
Purchase Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions by April 17 and enjoy access to hundreds of dollars worth of additional materials from Dr. Tony Alessandra, Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Jim Cathcart, Jill Konrath, Dave Lakhani, Bob Kantin, Dr. Rick Kirschner, CanDoGo.com, AllBusiness.com, SalesDog.com, Paul McCord and more. You can spend hundreds of dollars separately or you can invest about $20.00, order one copy of Keith’s book today and spend not one penny more. Look at the resources you get here.

Remember, this time sensitive event ends April 17 at midnight. I encourage you to get Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions and the additional materials from an impressive group of people who are supporting this book. You’ll be glad you did. Click here to learn more.

Get Keith’s book 37% off and hundreds of dollars worth of additional materials here.

March 10, 2008

Now there’s no excuse for not being a sales superstar

What is the single most difficult part of selling? Finding prospects? Closing the sale? Overcoming objections? Is it marketing, time management, or learning how to handle rejection?

No, it isn’t any of those. And, at the same time, it is all of those.

The single most difficult part of selling is figuring out how you can align your sales business with your personal strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

Sounds simple, right?

Hardly.

85% of all salespeople either fail and are flushed out of sales or never progress beyond simply being average or a little above average because they’ve never learned how to make their sales process with whom they are. Instead, they try to be who the sales trainers and their managers tell them to be—“use this marketing method and you’ll be successful”; “use this sales process and you’ll be successful”; “prospect this way and you’ll be successful.”

Guess what? That doesn’t work.

Every salesperson, professional and business owner is unique, with a unique set of personal behavioral traits, a unique personality, and with their own set of learned skills.

Although you can lean new skills, your behavior and personality are difficult if not impossible to change. In order to become a top producer, you MUST align your sales business with your personal strengths and you MUST minimize your personal weaknesses.

Trying to be someone else, working the way they work, doing what they do, using the same techniques and strategies they use won’t get you where you want to be.

That’s the “secret” the top producers have discovered. They’ve learned what works for them.

And you must do the same if you want to reach the top of your industry.

Top producers have had to work hard at learning what works for them through trial and error. For most, it has taken them years of experimenting. False starts. Failed efforts. Putting together the pieces one hard fought step at a time.

You don’t have to go through the same slow, painful process. SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar will lead you through your sales business in a logical, detailed process to discover exactly what your strengths and weaknesses are; what markets are ideally suited to your behavior, personality and skills; what marketing and prospecting methods are ideal for you; what sales process will maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses; develop your personal mental bulwark against the doubt, fear, and self-criticism that destroys most sales careers; and give you a complete plan, including your goals and objectives and a strategy to reach those goals.

superstar-selling-cover.jpg

SuperStar Selling is the only detailed guidebook to establishing YOUR plan to success. It doesn’t give you canned, easy answers. Instead, it leads you through the process of developing your own answers to the 12 keys of becoming a top producer.

It isn’t an easy book to read and certainly isn’t an easy book to deal with. It demands you take a very close, serious, critical look at where you are and exactly how you got there. Then it requires you to figure out in real terms where you want to go. Finally, it guides to through making radical changes to your business to put yourself in line to reach your goals.

Frankly, it is a book that only the most serious will finish. But if you take your task seriously and work through the book and then implement your new plan, you WILL become a top producer. You cannot master the book and NOT BECOME A TOP PRODUCER.

And best of all, if you order the book today at Amazon, you’ll get over $2,500 of bonuses from some of the top trainers in the industry such as
• Frank Rumbauskas
• Dave Lakhani
• Keith Rosen
• Jill Konrath
• Dr. Joe Vitale
• Andrew Sobel
• Lee Salz
• Dave Anderson
• and many others.

See all of the bonuses HERE.

Once you’ve purchased at Amazon, go HERE to register for your bonuses.

Whether you’re new to sales, an experienced professional, or have a team of salespeople, SuperStar Selling is a CAREER CHANGING book.

January 29, 2008

SuperStar Selling now available on Amazon for Prerelease Ordering

superstar-selling-cover.jpg

 My newest book, SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar, has just hit Amazon as a prerelease offering.  As a matter of fact, the posting is so new they still don’t have a picture of the cover of the book up (you see it on this page, though); they don’t have a page count (251 pages); and they don’t have the “search inside” feature up and working (they are so far behind on this feature it usually takes months to get it up and running).  The book should be in stock for delivery by the end of February or very early March.

Nevertheless, the book can be order now.  They won’t charge your credit card until the book is actually in stock and ready to ship.  The best part is that if you order as a prerelease offering, you’ll get a 5% discount.  Then when the book is in stock, if they are offering a discount off cover price ($16.95), you’ll get the discounted price PLUS the extra 5%

So, what is SuperStar Selling about?  It works step-by-step through the process of establishing a top producer sales business.  Designed for any salesperson who wants to take their career to higher levels, the book deals with all of the foundational aspects of becoming a sales superstar. 

What Roger Staubach calls the “unspectacular preparation for spectacular performance.” 

This is a real work book.  This isn’t for the casual reader or anyone who isn’t serious about changing their career.  The book demands a great deal from the reader.  Unlike so many sales books out today, there isn’t any fluff or filler.  Just step-by-step guidance in creating the sales business you want.  It requires you do create your own sales and marketing plan—but with guidance.  It doesn’t give you canned answers, rather it shows you exactly how to find you own personal answers to creating your personal sales practice.

Here’s the table of contents:

Introduction:  Can You Learn to be a SuperStar?

Key 1:  Your Sales History:  You Have to Know Where You’ve Been to Know How to Get Where You Want to Go.  A detailed examination of your sales history to find your historical sales and marketing numbers and ratios.

Key 2:  Knowing Your Strengths and Weaknesses.  Working through your sales history, personality and behavioral traits to find your personal sales strengths and weaknesses.  If you want to be a superstar, you must know what your strengths are and play to them—and what your weaknesses are and how to either turn them into strengths or minimize them.  And guessing at what they are won’t work–you must know what they are and how they relate to how you sell.

Key 3:  Committing to Your Career.  What are You Willing to Invest?  Just how much time, energy and money are you willing to commit to your career?  In this key you’ll work through the process of determining what you’re willing to commit and then you’ll create a schedule to put it into practice.

Key 4:  Finding Your Place in the Marketplace.  Examining your market alternatives so you can align your strengths to the markets where you can be most successful.

Key 5:  Aligning Your Strengths to Your Marketing Methods.  A detailed examination of the marketing methods available to you and finding those methods that cater to your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

Key 6:  Making Realistic Sales and Income Projections and Goals.  Are you like most salespeople and just snatch sales projections and goals out the thin air?  In this key you’ll establish realistic projections and goals that stretch you, that get where you where you want to go, but they won’t be wishful thinking or hopes, they will be based on real data so you’ll know exactly what you must do to get where you want to go.

Key 7:  Finding Your Sales Process.  You need an organized sales process.  You need a process that leads you through the sale.  Yet, there are a great many sales processes available to you.  Which one is right for you?  You’ll discover the process that caters to your strengths and minimizes your weaknesses.

Key 8:  Developing a Communication Campaign that Advances Your Cause.  All the prospecting and marketing in the world is useless unless you have a disciplined, effective way to maintain contact with your prospects and clients.  In this key you’ll develop and implement a real communication campaign designed to make your clients and prospects pay attention to you, not ignore you.

Key 9:  Developing the Skills You Need: Finding the Right Training.  There are thousands of sales trainers and companies to choose from.  Thousands of books, CD’s, articles and other training material.  How do you find the training that you really need?  Heck, for that matter, what areas do you need training in?  You’ll find your personal answers here.

Key 10:  Turning Plans into Reality:  Turning Giant Steps into Small Steps.  By the time you get to this key you’ll have developed a complete sales, marketing, communication and training plan for yourself, complete with sales projections and goals.  But how in the world do you make those reality?  Find out how to take those overwhelming giant goals and turn them into workable, reachable goals here.

Key 11:  Accountability:  Finding Your Coach or Mentor.  Few of us can do all of this alone.  We need someone to work with, someone to push us, someone to be accountable to.  Seldom is our spouse or even our sales manager the right person for that job.  We need a coach or mentor.  Almost every successful salesperson and manager I’ve ever known has had a coach or mentor—most have had both.  Discover where to find your personal mentor and/or coach here.

Key 12:  The Sales SuperStar Mindset.   Success in sales is determined far more by your mindset than by any other single aspect.  If you don’t have the right mindset, success is almost impossible.  Fortunately, that superstar mindset can be created—it isn’t a matter of either you have it or you don’t.  But, like everything else in the book, it takes commitment and effort.

As I said, the book is for serious salespeople who want serious change in their sales practices.  This isn’t an easy read nor is it a book for the casual reader.  It’s a book for the committed, for those who want what few salespeople will have have—a top producer career.

Let me share with you what a few who have read the manuscript have said about the book:

“Paul McCord has written the most complete sales bible for aspiring sales superstars I’ve ever read!  His 12 Keys will become your ‘Ten Commandments’ to both a far more profitable career and fulfilling life.”  Dave Anderson, best-selling author, How to Deal With Difficult Customers

“Think top sellers are born, not made?  If so, you’ll learn otherwise in this straight-shooting book by Paul McCord.  He takes the mystique out of their stellar results and shows you exactly what top producers do differently than the Average Joe.  Best of all, he shows you how you can replicate their achievements, capitalize on your personal strengths and take charge of your success.”  Jill Konrath, best-selling author, Selling to Big Companies

“In SuperStar Selling, Paul McCord lays out in a step-by-step program, that if followed, will result in success.  Finally, a sales ‘how-to’ book that really does show exactly how to do it.”  Paul Flood, President, Paul Flood Marketing, Fairfield, Ohio
”SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar is a must read of any independent business owner or sales manager charged with equipping a sales staff to write more business.  This book provides a clear, detailed path for any owner or manager to guide their team to massive success.”  Tom Baker, President, Advanced Automation, Dallas, Texas.

“This is a must read handbook for anyone wanting to go to the top in sales.  If you want to make a mark in sales, I strongly recommend you not only read the book, but implement what you learn.” Nkechi Ali-Balogun, Principal Consultant, NECCI Consulting, Logos, Nigeria

“Advice worth twice the price from the man who wrote the book on how to build a business through referrals.  A must-have for anyone looking to start from scratch or get to the top in their sales business.”  Robert Haynes, Financial Services Executive, Boston, MA

Available for prerelease ordering at AMAZON

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