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'Tactful Persistence:
The way closers get to the close'
The Beacon Business Newsletter, September 25, 2004
By Pete Kadens, CEO Acquirent LLC
In business today, people often confuse marketing
with sales, lead generation with business
development, and strategy with execution.
Unfortunately, there is a significant shortage
of people in our market today who solely execute.
This lack of “executors” is important
because revenue generally comes from successfully
executed plans.
In the lower to middle markets, companies
spend considerable funds on sales consultants
who more often than not develop strategies
that create a serious disconnect in the sales
process because strategy is only as good as
the people who are prepared to implement it.
In the late 90’s these same companies
often believed that the sales process could
be streamlined and disintermediated by eliminating
the salesperson and selling via another source,
such as the internet. However, in the past
few years it’s become clear that high-level
sales are built on trust, a trust that you
cannot obtain via the internet, but rather
only by looking someone in the eye. Hence,
it is becoming increasingly important in sales
to leverage the skills of a sales person who
can execute.
Execution is clearly a multi-tiered process
that varies depending on the underlying product
or service that the salesperson is selling.
However, there are a few constants that exist
in sales execution that should be engrained
in the minds of your salespeople. First, is
the theory of “tactful persistence.”
The best salespeople are professional at every
level and every stage of the sales process,
but also have the ability to constantly be
in contact with their prospects without becoming
the stereotypical, annoying salesperson who
prospects constantly avoid. Second, the greatest
misconception in sales is that a salesperson
can close a deal by making the cold call and
then going immediately for the close. Somewhere
along the line the salesperson probably forgot
about the art of the follow up. Unless your
company sells a point of purchase product
through a retail or internet channel, the
follow up strategy is crucial in order to
keep business in the pipeline and ensure that
your prospects will one day become your clients.
Third and probably most important, is that
your salespeople maintain both “focus”
and “momentum”. Sales can be a
roller coaster ride, but the best salespeople
execute through a reliable and repeatable
process that creates “focus” and
“momentum” in perpetuity.
When thinking about execution, it may be worthwhile
to consider
outsourcing your sales execution to an outside
firm. In any business there is an internal
metric that assesses the cost of actually
bringing in business, which is often called
the “cost of client acquisition.”
It has been proven that lower to middle market
companies can significantly lower their “cost
of client acquisition” by using an outside
firm to provide sales execution services.
There are high-fixed costs associated with
building an in-house sales team, or even with
hiring one or two salespeople in house, and
sales people are transient and often times
unreliable. The way to guard against these
potential pitfalls as a business owner is
to have an outside firm manage and build your
sales execution team, and then they bear the
risk of hiring, training, and managing your
salespeople.
Pete Kadens is the co-founder and CEO of Acquirent,
a Chicago-based
outsourced sales execution team (pkadens@acquirent.com.
Check out
Acquirent at www.acquirent.com
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