In our last Tip, “Sources of Value”, we shared 9 distinct sources that help you to create customer value. It included, but went well beyond, our solutions and capabilities. The last item in the Tip was perhaps the most important. It was “...
As business development people, it’s easy to fall into the trap of equating the value we help to create for our customers almost entirely with our solutions. While, yes, our solutions and capabilities help bring value, they aren’t enough on their own. Why not? Because it’s hard to clearly...
Continuing with the theme of qualification, another event in the cycle that can help us assess a situation is a meeting with the decision maker. In this step of the IMPAX Process, we leverage our research to identify and book a meeting with the person able to buy our value. Once we secure this...
February’s Tip focused on effective qualification, and the impact that this can have on sales results. This month, we continue the theme. A great way to get started on your qualification, before you put in a lot of work, is by doing an assessment.
Depending on the situation, you may...
Many of us are in the throes of territory and account planning, working to figure out how we will meet and exceed our targets in 2017. All of us should remember that the best way to improve our hit rate is to go after the right opportunities from the beginning. That’s just one reason qualifying...
In the past couple of Tips, we focused on the theme of “ending the year strong”, recognizing that many of us were wrapping up our selling year in conjunction with the calendar year.
As we were doing this, many of us were working on deals that had “gone dark” for one of several reasons...
This month, we continue the theme of “ending strong”, recognizing that many of us are wrapping up our selling year in conjunction with the calendar year. In our last Tip, we talked about 2 things we can do to end our selling year strong –...
For many of us in sales and relationship management, the end of the calendar year brings the end of our selling year. Some of us have made our numbers and some of us are still fighting to get there. The idea in this month’s tip is to “end strong”, bringing the year to an exciting and successful...
In our last Tip of the Month, we introduced the term V.O.C.C., or “Voice of the Customer’s Customer”, to highlight another way of looking at research. The idea is that, as we do our research, we can gain valuable insights by talking to the customers of the companies we are researching. As...
V.O.C. is an acronym that we are seeing a lot these days, and for good reason. The acronym stands for “Voice of the Customer”, and it emphasizes the importance of doing our research on our customer’s business. If we want to be a trusted advisor (or simply improve our odds of success) we need to...
