sales presentation

5 Takeaways – How Not to Do a Sales Presentation.

I walk into our conference room and the visiting presenting manager, salesman and sales engineer were waiting there to give us their “dog and pony” sales presentation in hopes of my organization partnering with them. I know all of presenters from a previous business life. All very professional and successful in their own right. What happened next was incredibly short sighted on their part however. Below are my 5 takeaways from this experience.

relationship

Top 10 Business Networking Tools.

Networking is certainly not new to business relationship building. The need for business relationships has been around as long as business transactions have taken place. The difference is now with social networking I can start relationships in minutes that typically took months or years before… if at all… anywhere in the world. Professionals and companies of all industries have adopted some sort of business networking integration with social media. They use these tools in a variety of ways to promote themselves, ideas and products.

tough economy

Sell in a Tough Economy.

Nothing was working! The first month as their sales manager I found myself watching our sales numbers take a dive right before my eyes in the current tough economy. My initial knee-jerk reaction was to give bigger discounts. That didn’t work. I changed direction with focusing on the “perfect solution” sale followed by strong closing tactics. It was important to capitalize on the few opportunities we were getting. That didn’t work either. If anything these changes were making things worse.

selling services

Selling Services. It Still Takes a Call.

In an effort to market my new services business I have embraced digital marketing in a big way. Selling services using social media venues, websites, blog posts, email campaigns and more I am connecting with tens of thousands regularly. I have made some tremendous progress with these endeavors. I have also come to realize that it still takes a call (or two or three) to make a sale. Why is that?