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The App Store Provides Insights into Your Company's Sales Challenges

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan

Article Overview: Let's look at your company, brands, products and services. Is there any possibility that someone could go wrong buying from you?

The App Store Provides Insights into Your Company's Sales Challenges

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

Let's look at your company, brands, products and services. Is there any possibility that someone could go wrong buying from you?

To answer this question, let's first look at Apples's App Store. Normally I simply find the app I need and download it on the spot but over the holidays I had enough time to actually browse the App store. When I got to the Book category I browsed by popularity and noticed that THE MOST POPULAR books for the iPad were not the latest romance novels, thrillers or biographies, and they weren't the New York Times bestsellers either. Ready?

1. Christmas Tale
2. Shakespeare
3. The Bible Reader
4. Marvel Comics
5. DC Comics
6. Twas The Night Before Christmas
7. Toy Story Read-Along
8. The Velveteen Rabbit
9. The Holy Bible - King James Edition
10. Dr. Seuss's ABC 3.99
11. Archie Comics
12. MeeGenius! Children's Books
13. Alice for the iPad-Lite
14. NIV Bible
15. Three Little Pigs
16. Jingle All the Way
17. Lesbian Short Stories, Part 1
18. Children's Bible
19. The Cat in the Hat 3.99
20. Comics+

Kids, comics, Bibles, and Freebies pretty much sum it up. Here's another way of looking at it. Except for #17, they are all either safe, easy, traditional, low cost or tried and true choices. You just can't go wrong making those choices.

If we eliminate FREE from the list, the only significant change is that the comics disappear to be replaced by more kids books, bibles and JFK: 50 Days.

If we eliminate the two Christmas books in the top 10, they would simply be replaced with two non-holiday kids books. If we eliminate the kids books altogether they would be replaced by more Bibles and Bible readers, and A Tale of Two Cities. And to reach the last of my top 10 paid non holiday, non kids books, Message Bible, we would reach the 166th most popular download.

Back to my opening question. Is there any possibility that someone could go wrong buying from you? Is buying from your company the safest choice? Is it the easiest choice? Is it the traditional choice? Is it free or very low priced? Is it the tried and true choice?

If it's not any one of those, then your salespeople better be performing in a big way (and I don't mean doing demos, presentations, quotes and proposals either). Because the only way to achieve and sustain success when you have competition that is a safer, easier, more traditional, lower priced or tried and true choice is for your salespeople to sell their asses off (and I'm not talking about hard work either).

Your salespeople must be smarter, more effective, more strategic and more tactical than ever before. They must also be more efficient, more capable and more resilient than ever before. And don't even think about sending them out there without an optimized, formal, structured sales process.

How many of your salespeople qualify?

Don't forget to vote for my Blog for Top Sales Blog of the Yearhere.

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Article Tags: app store, sales, sales strategy, salespeople



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