Making the Number

I've come across an interesting new book about Sales Benchmarking. Of course benchmarking has been around for sometime in other disciplines, but is rarely applied in sales. The concept is simple, look at your competitors or peers' sales operations and use hard data to compare yourself to them. 

On the way you find opportunities for improvement (and get to understand what you excel in). It even has a section in the book for how to overcome your own management's objections to implementing benchmarking. If you're in sales management you should take a look for some fresh ideas on data driven sales improvement.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Number-Sales-Benchmarking-Performance/dp/1591842174/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227693357&sr=8-1

Real human salespeople

Continuing on from my post about jargon, something that stuck with me from the seminal dotcom, the-world-will-never-be-the-same-again-whoop-whoop, book "The Cluetrain Manifesto" is the phrase "corporations should speak with a human voice". The premise being that we as consumers, even as business people in our working lives, have become cynical and distrusting of stiff language designed to keep us at a distance “We value your business. Your call is important to us.”, and that people want to deal with straight-talking people like them, not corporate automatons.

Admitting mistakes, speaking frankly, without jargon and showing interest and concern for the prospect is a genuine strength.

Sales questions : Attacking current vendor

Here are a few direct and indirect questions to be used as a starting point for attacking an incumbent vendor / current solution.
• How do you feel about (incumbent vendor)?
• What do you like/dislike about company / product?
• What would you like to improve upon?
• How could it be better?
• When you were talking to (incumbent vendor) initially, what did you decide they had to achieve? Did you/they achieve that?
• If you think back to when you started this, what were your success criteria? What was it you were hoping to achieve? How does that compare with what you got? Why do you think that is? What improvements/changes could be made?
• How have your needs / the market changed since you got your solution from (incumbent vendor)?
• What would your perfect product/vendor relationship look like?
• What are your criteria for selecting suppliers?
• What would really put one supplier ahead of another?
• What alternatives are you/ will you be looking at for this?
• What are you looking for in suppliers?
• What are your three most important criteria for selecting suppliers?
• How do you go about selecting suppliers?
• When you look at (incumbent vendor), how do you know whether they are doing a good job for you – how do you measure their performance?
• Thinking ahead a few years from now, what do you think you will need from your vendor?
• What was behind your decision to go with (incumbent vendor)? Does (incumbent vendor) still do that for you?
More questions for you to use in your selling coming soon. Bookmark/RSS SalesItch now…. And don’t forget to add a comment to share your favourite questions with the community!