Sales and Sales Management Blog

May 9, 2011

Register for the 2011 Sales and Marketing Success Conference

Article first published as ‘http://technorati.com/business/small-business/article/help-japan-and-attend-one-of/ Help Japan and Attend One of the Web Sessions of the 2011 Sales and Marketing Success Conference Beginning Monday, May 9</a> on Technorati.

The 2011 Sales and Marketing Success Conference, a five day web-based conference featuring 35 of the top sales minds in the world begins tomorrow, Monday, May 9 at Noon Eastern as Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling,  starts the conference off with a session titled Selling Successfully to Crazy-Busy People.

Each session will be a quick but highly targeted 30 minutes.

Each day features 7 different sessions, each lead by a different leading light in the world of sales training and coaching.

Just a few of the top names featured during the week are: Linda Richardson, Dave Kurlan, Colleen Francis, Nigel Edelshain, John Doerr, Wendy Weiss, Dave Stein, and many, many more.

Sessions will cover virtually every segment of the sales process, including how to successfully use social media, as well as sessions on leadership and sales management.

You can see the whole list of sessions HERE

And here’s even better news—when you attend any given session you’ll be helping the Red Cross in their mission in Japan.

Jonathan Farrington, the host of the conference says,

Just four weeks after the Magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake and a tsunami which delivered 46ft waves, we learn that the death toll is likely to top 25.000, and recovery is going to take not years, but possibly decades, maybe even a generation, at a cost of at least $250 billion.

This is our opportunity to show that the sales community – so often derided for being shallow and materialistic, amongst other things – actually has a very big heart.

We plan to charge just $5 registration fee per presentation, and we are limited to 1000 guests per session, so places will be allocated on a “first come – first served” basis.

Can I count on your support? Together we can make a worthwhile *contribution to the people of Japan.

That’s right, it only costs $5 to attend any one session and 100% of those dollars will be donated to the Red Cross specifically for Japan.  At the end of each session you’ll be given an opportunity to donate an additional $1, $5, or $10 if you so wish.

Here is a tremendous opportunity to contribute to the efforts in Japan and get great training at the same time. 

What a great deal!!!

I encourage you to seriously consider attending my session Friday, May 13 at noon Eastern time as I’ll be giving you the tools you’ll need to do the detective work to figure out exactly who your client knows that you know you want to be referred to—and knowing that will allow you to both greatly increase the number of referrals you get and, more importantly, get referrals to prospects that you know are great prospects for you.

Here is the registration page for my session.

Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity to help yourself improve your sales while helping those who are in desperate need of help.

March 6, 2011

SalesCrunch.com Lists the Top 50 Sales Blogs

Filed under: Sales Resources — Paul McCord @ 1:28 pm

SalesCrunch follows over 200 of the best sales blogs each day! This is obviously far too many for any normal human to filter and process. So when Hubspot posted their Top 100 Marketing Blogs using the new groups feature in Blog Grader last week the folks at SalesCrunch were super excited. They immediately decided to feed their list of 200+ blogs into the tool to generate the SalesCrunch Top 50 Sales Blogs. The list is generated according to the “Grade” in Blog Grader and is updated daily so the list is always accurate and up to date. The bios below the list are for the Top 50 as rated at the time we posted the list, so you can track progress over time.

They narrowed the list down to sales-specific blogs. But there are other folks out there writing great stuff that, while not 100% focused on sales, is essential to selling. So they included two of our absolutely favorite must-reads below the list as honorable mentions: Both Sides of The Table and IdeaTransplant.

I’m proud that the Sales and Sales Management Blog didn’t just make the list, but is in the top 10 of all sales blogs.

There are a number of lists of great sales blogs and SalesCrunch is one.  I encourage you to head over and take a look at the entire list.  But to get you started, here are the top 10 today:

1 sellsellsell.salesnexus.com
2 www.keithferrazzi
3 www.retaildoc.com/blog/
4 www.thejfblogit.co.uk/
5 thesalesblog.com/
6 salesandmanagementblog.com/
7 www.fillthefunnel.com
8 danwaldschmidt.com/
9 scoremoresales.com/
10 www.mwmclaughlin.com/

February 15, 2011

Free Roundtable Discussion: The Changing Face of Professional Selling Tuesday February 22, Noon Eastern

Filed under: career development,Sales Resources,success — Paul McCord @ 10:21 am
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“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” - Charles Darwin  

Whatever got you where you are today will not be sufficient to keep you there. A rapidly changing environment is the regular background against which organizations must develop.  

Change is continuous and will become more rapid as we move forward over time. The one constant that we can rely upon in commercial life is change – everything is changing, everyday.  

We can choose to embrace the changes, adapt, and thrive, or we can resist, and risk extinction.

The questions we should all be asking ourselves right now are:

What will the sales landscape really look like in five years time?

Who will survive?

How will they survive?

Who will perish?

Join seven of the world’s top sales experts and recognized thought leaders in the sales space, for what promises to be a highly thought-provoking debate.

The Panel

Joanne Black – is the leading authority on referral selling, and the author of No More Cold CallingTM: The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust. Wherever genuine sales thought leaders have congregated, you will always find Joanne, and also in that company, you’ll discover….

Paul McCord – is the president of McCord Training, author of the Amazon and Barnes and Noble best-selling book on referral generation, Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals (John Wiley and Sons, 2008), and SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar, not forgetting Bust Your Slump, which he released last year. www.dynamicsalesgrowth.com  

Colleen Francis – is the president and founder of Canada-based Engage Selling Solutions — a thriving sales-training organization that delivers tailor-made, winning solutions to sales and marketing professionals internationally. Colleen is high-energy and high-commitment, personified.

Jeb Brooks – is Executive Vice President of The Brooks Group, one of the world’s top Sales Training Firms as ranked by Selling Power Magazine , Training Industry, Inc., and The American Business Awards. Over its 35 year history, The Brooks Group has helped more than 2,000 sales-driven companies in nearly 500 industries select, hire, train, and retain top performing salespeople.

Nigel Edelshain – is the man who first coined the term “Sales 2.0″ and he is CEO of Sales 2.0 (LLC). Sales teams trained by Sales 2.0 get radically superior results by employing social media and Sales 2.0 tools in their sales processes. Sales 2.0 works extensively with companies in sales-intensive industries like IT services, insurance, software, printing and telecommunications  

Dan Waldschmidt – is one of the founders of IntroMojo, a popular inspirational speaker, expert author, and a sought-after strategist on creating edgy conversations in the marketplace. He blogs regularly on his popular motivational selling blog Edge of Explosion

The Chairman

Jonathan Farrington – is a globally recognized business coach, mentor, author, and consultant. He is Chairman of The JF Corporation and CEO of Top Sales Associates, the creator and CEO of Top Sales World and the man behind the Annual Top Sales Awards.

‘When a collection of brilliant minds hearts and talents come together – expect a ….. lively debate”‘

When? Tuesday February 22nd at 12 Noon (Eastern) 5pm GMT

How Much? Registration is FREE

Where? Please register HERE

In fact, don’t just join, join in!

February 3, 2011

Top Sales World Publishes Free EBook Featuring the Top 10 Sales Articles of 2010

The Top Sales World has just released a free eBook featuring the Top 10 Sales Articles finalists of 2010.  Selected from the hundreds of sales articles published each month, Top 10 Sales Articles selects the 10 best sales articles published on various platforms each month and then a panel of top sales minds selects the top article of the month.  With articles in the competition written by household names in the sales industry such as Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and Tom Hopkins to new, up and coming writers, competition is tough.  At the end of the year the articles of the month vie for the top article of the year award at Top Sales Awards.

Every month you’ll be directed to great articles and, of course, at the end of the year you have some of the best thinking of the year at your fingertips. 

The articles for 2010 are:

Plan Goals and Plan on the Means of Hitting Them, by Tibor Shanto

Sales Call Reports—Are They Worth the Hassle? by Paul McCord

Sales Lessons Learned From a Recession, by Kelley Robertson

Pipeline or Pipe Dream? by Gil Cargil

Why Social Networking You Way Won’t Build Your Business, by Joanne Black

3 Secrets of High Performance Selling, by Daniel Waldschmidt

The Prospecting Dilemma, by Kendra Lee

Are You Customer Centric? by Stu Schlackman

Instilling Pride—A Key to Eliciting Excellence, by Michael Beck

Marketing—Stupid Marketing Tricks and Other Topics, by Dave Brock

Networking: It’s Only Natural, by Diane Helbig

I encourage you to go to Top Sales World, look for the Top Sales Articles widget (about half way down the page, just below the penguins) and click to download your copy of the eBook.

In addition, I encourage you bookmark Top 10 Sales Articles and head over there each month to get the best sales articles published the previous month.

And since you’re at Top Sales World anyway, why not click on the Top Sales World Article of the Day which is my article: Are You A Sales Professional or Semi-Skilled Laborer?

October 20, 2010

3 Sales Resources Well Worth Taking a Look At

Filed under: sales,Sales Resources,selling,small business — Paul McCord @ 4:27 pm
Tags: , ,

There are a ton of great resources on the net for salespeople and companies.  In fact, there are so many it’s hard to keep track of ‘em.  Let me point out three (one self-serving) that I think are worth your time:

  1. My friend Paul Castain of YourSalesPlaybook.com is top notch on helping sellers learn how to really get value out of social media.  His blog is right on the money—and funny to boot; his observations sharp; and his free stuff worth every penny and more.Recently he published a new ditty called “How to Become More Visible to Your Network.”  It is 25 ways to really build some relationships with those people you meet whether in the real world or your virtual business worlk.  Valuable, valuable ebook. 

    Get your free copy here.
  2. Do you or your company do webinars whether free or paid?  If you do you need to try out Webinar Box Office from Webfishery.  Webinar Box Office claims to promote your upcoming webinar on more than 250 social media sites—for FREE.  Their webinar database is searchable by subject and promoted on Facebook, Twitter, and others. Worth a try. 

    List your webinar HERE

  3. Roger Bauer interviewed me about how to reignite your sales.  You can find the interview at the Bauer Pauer Hauer HERE.  You’ll learn the three things you must do to get your sales going again; the biggest mistake salespeople and managers are making right now; how to get a ton of referrals almost overnight; and much more.

 I know everyone is busy but I think each of these is worth taking a few minutes to take a look at. 

September 14, 2010

Making the Sales World a Little Smaller and a Lot More Valuable

Sales 2.0 … Networking online … Standing out …  Crystal clear messaging … global business.  So many ways to reach out to prospects and clients and so many pitfalls.  So little time to assimilate the very best practices.

What’s a busy sales professional to do?

Glad you asked. Just this week a dynamic, exciting new (and free) international sales community launched. I’m participating in Top Sales World because it provides the very best support from people like me who are out to help busy people like you achieve greater selling results while deriving greater reward and satisfaction from your own efforts.

We all want to get better what we do. Top Sales World brings together top gurus in the United States and other countries who provide unparalleled information in the form of how-to-guides, one-on-one advice, webinars, articles and much more. Get help on a specific problem. Learn to focus on your goals on a daily basis. See the latest trends. Read about the latest Sales AllStar or Featured Contributor.

Top Sales World evolved from Top Sales Experts and incorporates regular webinars  on everything from “Sales 2.0 and Selling to Big Companies” to “How the Most Successful Companies Develop Their Sales Teams” to “Turn Your Connections into Cash” and “Elevator Speeches that Sing” and “The Dynamic Value Proposition.”

Each event gives you top information and tips you can put to use immediately. Download each presentation  from Top Sales World when it suits your timeframe.

Better yet, new, live webinars are taking place all the time.  On Sept. 16, join Wendy Weiss, the Queen of Cold Calling, for “Cold Calling 2010: What’s Working Today?” Dr. Tony Alessandra presents on “What Exactly is Collaborative Selling” on Sept. 21.  A panel of experts shares “How to Stride into the Final Quarter and Finish the Year Strongly” on Sept. 28.

What’s not to like? I strongly recommend you visit Top Sales World and see for yourself.

January 5, 2010

Increase Your Sales and Productivity in 2010

Filed under: sales,Sales Resources,selling — Paul McCord @ 10:46 am
Tags: , , ,

My friend Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools has just released a great new ebook, Increase Sales Productivity in 2010: Sales tools and the path to productivity gains that you can get right now for free.

Nancy lays out for you a ton of great sales tools that will help you or your sales team increase productivity, sales, and most importantly, income.

Nancy will introduce you to tools to:

  • Help you generate more leads
  • Make better presentations
  • Save time and energy
  • Organize your client and prospect follow-up
  • Be a better manager

And lots more.

Hop on over and claim your copy.  Registration is necessary but that’s such as small price to pay for such a great resource.

Register and download you copy HERE

December 12, 2009

It’s Time to Vote for the Sales Article of the Year

It’s time for the Top 10 Sales Articles to get down to the nitty-gritty of deciding on The Sales Article of the Year.  Over the year, Top 10 Sales Articles has culled through the thousands of articles published during the course of the year.  Each month they have picked the best article published that month.  Now, it’s time to select the best of the best for 2009

Here’s how it works:  From now until December 21 you can vote for your favorite article.  Reader votes are worth half the total points, the other half will be awarded by the Top 10 Sales Articles panel of professional sales trainers.

There are 12 great articles to choose from:

January:    Why You Are Not Generating Leads, by Dr. Drew Stevens

February:  Just Follow Up, by Keith Rosen

March:  Lift vs. Drag—A Business Leader’s Perspective, by Waldo Waldman

April:  What Hollywood Taught Me—7 Ways to Become a Star, by Patricia Fripp

May:  The Sign of a True Sales Pro—Admitting We’re Never too Good for Coaching, by Nancy Bleeke

July:  Email is the New Phone, Kendra Lee

August:  5 Way’s to Gauge Your Sales Manager’s Coaching, by Steven Rosen

September:  How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle, by Tibor Shanto

October:  Gain Your Prospect’s Attention, by Wendy Weiss

November:  No, You Don’t Have to Cold Call—Ever, by ME

December:  Your New Referral Network: It’s Always about the People You Know, by Joanne Black

I hate these reader vote things because there is the possibility of instead of it being a vote for the best article it is simply a vote for a favorite author.  So, I’m not going to ask you to go and vote for me, but I do ask you go to Top 10 Sales Articles, read the articles and vote for the article you believe to be the best of the year (mine, of course).

November 25, 2009

Book Review: Own the Room: Business Presentations that Persuade, Engage, & Get Results

Put a classically trained actor, an award winning director, and a clinical psychologist together and what do you get?  Why a book that should be on every seller’s bookshelf, of course.

David Booth, Deborah Shames, and Peter Desberg, the authors of Own the Room: Business Presentations that Persuade, Engage, & Get Results (McGraw Hill: 2010), are not the typical authors you’ll run across when looking for a book that can help you increase your sales and income.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that none of the authors can define the Puppy Dog Close, write a top notch cold calling script, or coach you through the negotiation process with a tough customer. 

They don’t know sales; they know people, they know presentation, they know how to connect with others.  They know how to use words, body language, voice, props, and silence—all the things that we sellers use every day, usually with little grace and less control—to gain and keep someone’s attention.  More importantly, they know how to turn attention into genuine interest. 

Own the Room isn’t going to close deals for you, but it is going to give you the opportunity to close deals by showing you how to really engage your prospects and make presentations that will bring the prospect along with you; and frankly, you can’t sell if your prospect has turned you off and is daydreaming about what they’re going to have for lunch—or the relief they’d feel if they could throw you and your damned PowerPoint presentation out the window.

From your opening sentence—you’ve got 30 to 60 seconds to grab (or lose) your audience’s attention—to your closing remarks, Own the Room gives solid, tested and proven guidance.  Guidance is what you  get in Own the Room, not just tips and tricks, and because the authors are giving guidance and I’m dense, I sometimes wished they’d been more concrete and said “Thou shalt do this in exactly this way” instead of giving an example of the concept and leaving the rest up to me.   

Booth, Shames, and Desberg take on all aspects of the presentation from preparation to dealing with stage fright to using PowerPoint to using physical movement to make your point to how to make effective team presentations.  The book seeks to be comprehensive in scope without smothering you with needless detail.

Whether your make presentations to a single potential buyer or to a room of thousands at a formal dinner, you’ll walk away from Own the Room with some very practical guidance that will make your presentations more effective—or very likely, transform them altogether.  Either way, you’ll sell more of whatever you’re selling.

November 19, 2009

A Titanic Merger that Will Rock the Sales World

Well, OK, so maybe it isn’t quite that big but my good friend Jan Visser has merged the old SalesTeamTools.com and the old SalesMarks.com into the newly combined Sales Marks.

If you’re not familiar with either of these sites, you’re missing a great deal of important material, so combining them into a single site is a fantastic idea that will give visitors to the new Sales Marks a huge platform of great stuff all at a single location.

The old Sales Team Tools focused on examining and evaluating tools—phones, contact management software, business card scanners, you name it–to make sales and selling easier.  Tools that have been around and new ones alike have been evaluated.  One of the best aspects of the site was that salespeople who have used the various tools get to comment on them and present their opinions and experiences.  Sales Team Tools has been a great place to keep up the sales world’s tools—both those tools designed specifically for sellers and those general technology tools that make selling easier or more efficient.  If you’ve been a Sales Team Tools regular, you’ll lose nothing—just gain everything that Sales Marks had to offer.

Sales Marks offers a number of high quality downloads from Tibor Shanto’s newest e-book published by Sales Marks “6 Ways to More Sales Appointments” to How to Organize a Sales Blitz to a free Sales Activity Report template and lots more.  The site also has hundreds of articles from top sales trainers such as Zig Zigler, Dave Brock, Tom Freese, Jeff Thull, Colleen Francis, Bill Caskey, Jill Konrath, myself and many, many more.  Best of all, Jan has a section called 100 Tips that lists the newest 100 articles, saving you a great deal of time searching through the entire article database. 

But, WAIT!  There’s MORE! 

The site offers a number of free sales guides—for instance one on tuning your sales pitch or another on writing a cold calling sales script.   And as a bonus, there are dozens of great sales quotes from everyone from Florence Nightingale to Pappa Joe (Joe Paterno, Head Coach of Penn State for those non college football fans) to Eleanor Roosevelt (can’t think of her in terms of sales?  Go find out) to Milton Berle—and even some real sales folks like Zig, Brian Tracey and others.

But Wait!  There’s Even MORE!

And now, Jan has added some great new things for his visitors.  Here’s how he described them to me in an email I received yesterday:

It’s almost 2010 – so I thought I’d run a tally on available selling days in 2010. The result was 254! Only 254 days and that’s not including vacations and days around the holidays. Sales and small biz people better make sure every day counts! That’s why I developed a few fun resources.

First, there’s a section called “Sales Months” – a new PDF poster every month, showing the current/next month – displaying selling days and a motivational sales quote. They can be downloaded for free at http://salesmarks.com/sales-months/

Then, there’s a need to remember that we only have 254 days in 2010.  For that purpose, I created a Sales Days Sheet – a PDF poster listing selling days for 2010 per month, per quarter – with a reminder to make sure you make every day counts. They can be downloaded here:

http://salesmarks.com/sales-days/

 Finally, a recession brings pressure for sales people looking for a job and for hiring sales managers alike. We thought we’d help both a little with a new download called Sales Interview Questions. They saved me from mis-hiring a few times and thought I’d share them with others. They can be downloaded here:

http://salesmarks.com/sales-interview-questions/               

All of this for only one easy payment of—NOTHING!

That’s right; you pay absolutely nothing for this amazing offer.  All you have to do is use this incredible site to help build your sales business.

Anyway, go check out Jan’s bigger and better site HERE

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