I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a creative firm with someone in the role of Sales Manager. Sometimes the owner/founder is playing that role, but at best, he’s a player/coach. When I look outside the creative world, I could make an argument that sales managers are the most undervalued member of a growing company’s…
When I started my business, I learned a “one-call-close” sales process. I would walk into the office of an agency owner that I had never met before, and my goal was to walk out with a check! The crazy part is that it worked. While I had success with this process, I don’t recommend it…
There are no bad clients… ~Jason Swenk I heard Jason say this on a podcast recently, and I stopped in my tracks and rewound to listen to it again. There are no bad clients… “Of course there are bad clients, Jason! You ran an agency; you should know that!” Just listening to him say that…
So we’ve qualified our leads, then we discovered the scope of their issue and educated them about the implications it has for them, now it’s time to close the deal. Do you: A. Send a proposal via email and wait for your prospect to call? B. Give your prospect a call, “Just to follow up…
I was helping my friend move into their new house. Like many houses in Chicago, the wiring in this house was antique. The inspector had told him to call an electrician before he moved in, but he wasn’t sure it was needed. The plugs all worked, the lights came on, that’s enough, right? While we…
When you are responsible for sales, you have only one currency to spend — your time. So, it’s incredibly painful to spend time with a prospect and then find out that they don’t have the money, or they don’t see the value in your services. It’s especially painful when you’ve invested time with a prospect, created…
When I started my business, I knew that I had to get better at sales. I didn’t know the first thing about sales, and I knew I had to sell or starve! I dove into an expensive training course that taught me a specific consultative selling process. (It cost about as much as a year…
We are in a world with massive uncertainty, and yet we need to run our business. How do we create a plan for the rest of 2020? The first thing I know is that it’s not going to be a plan like you made in January. We can’t just take last year, add 15%, target…
I was listening in as a client of mine conducted an initial phone call with someone who was interested in her services. The call was going well and the prospect came out with, This all sounds really great, how do we get started working on this together? To hear that sentence from a prospect is…
You know when you are in a “tribe” because you do the things that your tribe does, you wear the things that they wear, you sound like them, you look like them… Seth Godin, in one of his most popular blog posts, called it “People like us do things like this.” So when you think…