In a market where buyers call the shots, sales executives everywhere are increasingly struggling to meet their revenue and profitability goals.
“CEO’s are investing more than ever in their salesforces, but results aren’t improving” reports Lynette Ryals, professor of strategic sales and account management at the U.K’s Cranfield School of Management and Iain Davies, a lecturer at the University of Bath.
A Ryals and Davies study of 800 business development managers, account managers, and telesales people from a cross section of U.K. blue chip companies’ published in a 2010, Harvard Business Review paints a bleak picture of selling in a choice saturated, Googledriven world:
Only 9.1% of sales meetings result in a sale.
Just 1 out of 250 salespeople exceed their targets.
$1,760 of profit per sale is needed just to cover the cost of failed sales meetings,
assuming that the meeting cost, on average, $16019.
One brain, two rival minds: Why do smart buyers make dumb decisions
Every day buyers make poor choices. Even the smartest buyers commonly make dumb decisions.
What makes content go viral? Stoking the fire with high arousal emotions
Why do some messages get shared around? What makes online content go viral?
If an armed intruder gate-crashed your dinner party how would you respond?
It’s easy to think we live in a hate-filled world and as individuals we are powerless to influence what happens to us.
Sales productivity is falling
From ballpoints to lighters: the power of an Aha! insight
The power of an insight comes from its remarkable ability to reframe the way we think and motivate us to take action. A business-changing example of the power of a simple insight to multiply value comes from BIC, the famous ballpoint pen makers.
Marcel Bich founded the BIC Corporation following World War II. For nearly thirty years BIC saw itself as a maker of low cost plastic ballpoint pens.
How do ads change our behaviour? What influencing techniques work best?
Marketing departments spend an astonishing one trillion US dollars a year on advertising. So what types of persuasive messages pack the most punch?
Gloves on the boardroom table: Unlocking the secrets of selling
In 2002 I read John Kotter and Dan Cohen’s influential book The Heart of Change. I was captivated by one story: ‘Gloves on the Boardroom Table.’
Gloves on the boardroom table
A brilliant example of an Aha! guided discovery process that also demonstrates the seductive power of self-persuasion comes from from John Stegner, a creative catalyst who worked as a manager for a U.S. billion dollar sized manufacturer.
Stegner believed his company was wasting millions of dollars through wasteful purchasing practices. He believed the potential savings were huge. “I thought we had an opportunity to drive down purchasing costs not by two per cent but by something in the order of $1 billion over the next five years”, said Stegner.
To capture these savings Stegner knew he would have to persuade his bosses that the savings were possible and a concerted effort across the firm was worthwhile. And herein lay the problem. Few of his bosses shared Stegner’s views that their firms purchasing practices were riddled with inefficiencies.
To overcome his bosses’ skepticism and complacency Stegner could have prepared a provocative, persuasive PowerPoint pitch supported by spreadsheets of credible data. That’s what most managers in a similar position would have done.
