I was on a great webinar last week presented by Dow Jones and CSO Insights, and I recommend that you listen to the replay.  You can click here to watch the “Successful Sales Strategies” replay.  We can talk about Sales 2.0, and sales effectiveness, or even sales optimization.  But a lot of what is making sales people successful in this economy is a) having good sales intelligence and b) having an effective sales plan or an account plan!

Why did I like this so much?  First, they based the strategies not only on the sales truths that don’t change, but on the completely changed realities of selling today.

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I ran across this video because a friend and colleague, Trish Bertuzzi, wrote a great blog post about “Crossing the Chasm” in technology sales, and used this video as an example.  Seth Godin used it and said,

“Initiators are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Guy #3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Guy #49 is irrelevant.”

We as sales people and entrepreneurs are in many ways that Crazy Guy dancing.  But hey! Look what happens if you dance long enough!  Just keep dancing, and dance like nobody is watching.  Maybe that means making huge mistakes on a cold call or taking a huge risk on a sales tactic or strategy.  Just keep dancing and selling.  You will win and you will succeed… somehow.. and maybe with a 100 weird friends dancing along

Steve

As I sit typing this, I admit that I have been staring at the screen for an hour. (well, maybe not a full hour, but..) With everything that is going on in the markets around the world, I just couldn’t decide what to post.  I finally decided that if I could offer some tips for surviving the fourth quarter and setting up the first quarter that would be useful.

Last week I made several suggestions including looking at past business and past messaging.  All of that applies still.  However, I would suggest a few more things for this quarter.

First, focus on the fundamentals.  Get back to basics. One of my favorite stories is about Vince Lombardi.  Every year the first day of training camp he would hold up a ball as say to the team, “This is a Foot Ball.”   By the way, by fundamentals I mean, Prospecting, Questioning, cold calls, customer follow up, research, and of course Strategy Planning.

What are you or you team doing to focus on the fundamentals?  Check out the about.com article by Darrell Zahorsky.  He has great experience and a nice write up on sales strategies.

Now is all of the focus on Q4, don’t forget about Q1.  I am fond of saying that as sales people we “Drain the swamp” every year end… But the most successful sales people plan for the first quarter.  They get out of the gate fast and don’t have to play catch up.  We as sales people have a big red RESET button that gets pushed on December 31^st.

One way to get a jump on the first quarter is to elephant hunt in the fourth.  Why?  Because you know that you aren’t looking for end of year business, and so do they.  You have time to build a relationship and sell at a slower pace that large enterprise companies need anyway.  For a good article on Elephant hunting, see Ray Silverstein’s article at Entrepreneur.com.

Last suggestion… Stop worrying about the 201(k).  I say to myself and always to sales teams… “Sell your way out of it!”