Engineers, technicians & scientists as sales professionals

It has been a long held belief that extroverts made the best sales people; the gift of the gab, being charming and persuasive, telling a good story, people oriented and friendly, and all that. However, given the increasing need to make well informed decisions and manage risk before we buy, our warm, chatty, convivial friends may need to learn a lesson or two from the more ambiverted/ introverted types many […]

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Sell and Deliver Value or Commoditise

With business becoming much more complex and value harder to discern in product sales alone, business leaders have to make serious decisions about how to do business. In essence, they have two choices in terms of the way to run legitimate operations: Run a business that sells unique solutions or customised products/services and generates reasonable margins and delivers real value beyond product. This means stepping up their game, building out

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Sales Trend 3: Human Centred Selling – designing Empathetic Customer Centric Cultures

Sales Trend 3 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2018 is about Human Centred Selling. Bestselling author and business icon Stephen Covey once said: “When you show deep empathy toward others … That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems”. In this hyper connected world it’s easy to gain access to information and make simple online purchases that are transactional in nature; items that we know

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Sales Trend 2 – The case for long-term focus

Sales Trend 2 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends for 2018 Report is the case for long-term focus and strategy. It’s no news that most businesses are focused on the short-term, living from quarter to quarter, and that although there’s ongoing argument about whether there’s enough evidence or not to say that long-term businesses perform better, most of the arguments against it (pro short-term) focus only on profits. However, this

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Sales Trend 1 – The Selling Better Manifesto

Sales Trend 1 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends for 2018 Report is our Selling Better Manifesto. It talks about the Selling Better Movement and it explains why we have started it. We have created The Selling Better Movement with the hope it will help people understand that there’s a better way of doing business. A way in which we can all be prosperous. The Selling Better Movement is an

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12 Sales Trends for 2018 – Welcome to the State of Flux

The world, more specifically the human world, is changing and moving at lightning speed, adapting and evolving, and getting more complex by the day, to the point where it is becoming too overwhelming for many. Just when we need to be able to really think about and manage complexity, there is a flight to the simplistic to just cope with the day to day. Simple solutions, easy fixes are called

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Sales Trend 11 – Sales to Add Value to Procurement, Not Just Follow the Process

Sales Trend 11 from Barrett’s 12 Sales Trends for 2017 Report is about Procurement. Guest author Ben Shute, CEO of Comprara, shares his insights. It was 1999 when De Vincentis and Rackham (of SPIN Selling fame) wrote ‘Rethinking the Sales Force’, a book describing how the rise and rise of procurement challenged sales professionals about how best to organise business-to-business sales teams. Fast forward to 2016 and there are 15,000

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The Silent Majority

Sales and salespeople The history of sales methodologies and salespeople is full of twists and turns. With a few excellent –or at least well-intentioned– ways of selling and many others that are the complete opposite. There was a time when the salesperson was the only one with information about new products—from the end of the 19th century to mid-20th century; they were the experts and customers were in their hands

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New metrics

When we talk about sales metrics we usually think units, volumes, quota, members signed, calls made. Generally speaking, these metrics would have been put in place in an organisation at the time that the sales team was established, and (maybe) changed from time to time, usually from quota to number of calls or units, and so on. The current state of markets and most industries are quite different from the

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12 Sales Trends for 2017

We are pleased to release our 8th annual 12 sales trends report. 2017 Sales Trends focuses on – Going from ordinary to extraordinary In times of major change, uncertainty and upheaval we have two choices: 1) bunker down, keeping our heads low, waiting for things to pass and settle down back to normal, or 2) embrace the change and ride the waves towards the future creating a new normal. Opting

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