It's hard to believe, but there are fewer than 100 days left to achieve 2011 goals! Are you on track to achieve your sales goals?
Lisa Leitch
There are 13 weeks remaining in this year of 2011—realistically less than 60 actual selling days, if we remove holidays and weekends!
Whether you're 9, 29 or 49—September usually signifies the season of Back to School and Back to Business.
It seems that more and more people are expecting tips for the job they do and even expecting more of a tip.
At the beginning of this new year, I set my business and personal goals using this new SMART criteria. For my personal goals, I wanted to do a thrilling goal with my husband and both my daughters.
A few years ago during my summer vacation, I took a few hours to sit by the lake and strategize goals for both my business and personal life.
What makes salespeople and sales teams more successful? I've been asked this question a lot during the past few months.
What's the biggest challenge facing salespeople these days? We hear it all the time—setting up an initial meeting with a prospective client is getting tougher and tougher.
For our recent "Turning the table: Clients tell us how you can win their business" webinar, I asked our powerful panelists what it takes to earn their trust. The new standard? "You need to bend over backwards."
For more than 10 years, I have committed my Friday mornings to making 10 phone calls to grow my business. This has proven to be one of my secret business growth strategies, and it has worked extremely well ... until recently.
Last fall, I made a commitment to start using social media to see if it would help grow our business. So we set a goal of increasing our LinkedIn connections from approximately 100 to 500 by December 31.
While in St. Lucia enjoying a rejuvenating week of holidays, my husband Tom and I ventured into the town of Castries. There we found a market with hundreds of local merchants selling spices, vegetables, souvenirs and any wares tourists will buy.
In observing a recent sales conversation, I wondered why the salesperson had automatically assumed that price and saving money were the most important factors to the CMO.
I love to shop-for my business and, of course, for me! But I find that these days there are so many choices—brands, colors and styles, to name just a few—that it's hard to make buying decisions.
In these precarious and unpredictable times, you have two choices—you can deploy a defensive sales strategy or an offensive sales strategy. If you choose to run defense, you will sit and weather the storm, stop spending and buckle down for a tough year. On the other hand, if you choose to run offense, you will become proactive and savvy, and show your clients you can and will grow their businesses in 2009.