Three-quarters of the secret to professional, strategic selling boils down to asking the Best Questions and listening carefully to the answers. Most of the Best Questions have to do with uncovering the crucial, underlying needs your products or services might serve....

Companies spend about $1 billion a year to deliver training to their salespeople. Ninety percent of that sales training fails to produce meaningful, long-term gains in performance....

In prospecting, your objective most often is to persuade a new customer to agree to meet with you face-to-face. To gain that commitment, you must convince the prospect that you are someone worth meeting....

Sales training consumes time and costs money. If training does not produce meaningful, long-term performance gains in a sales force, then it’s hard to see why any company would bother with it....

Salespeople are commonly told to sell "solutions" and "value" rather than just product features. But when the time comes to present their products, they fall back on generic scripts with no direct connection to any specific needs the customer has revealed....

That is the question on every customer’s mind. It is the final determiner of every buying decision. Unless you are talking to the owner of a company, nobody cares deeply about dollars saved or productivity improvements....

In every other business function (accounting, engineering, operations) there are documented processes, common cultures, and established vocabularies with terms that are clearly understood - everywhere except in sales....

That is the question on every customer’s mind. It is the final determiner of every buying decision. Unless you are talking to the owner of a company, nobody cares deeply about dollars saved or productivity improvements. What most corporate buyers really want to know is, “How will I be better off...

A lot of salespeople are good at organizing. Some are even good at strategizing. But very few know how to use those skills to devise an effective, repeatable plan for gaining commitment from customers—a plan that begins to take shape before you make your first sales call....

Top salespeople have three secrets that make them more successful prospectors. They have a well-defined approach for getting in the door. They identify the best prospects. And they conquer call reluctance....