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Linda Richardson Articles

Written by: Linda Richardson

The Value YOU Bring Is As Important As Your Products - Click To Read Article
What you bring as YOU, the value you add to helping customers meet their business objectives, your ability to help them see a broader perspective, is as important, often more important, than what your products will do for them. Lately, there has been a focus on the need for salespeople to increase their business acumen - and rightly so.

Reaping Full Benefits of an Unwarranted Concession - Click To Read Article
There is a way to make a concession and a way not to: To save you from wasting time, money, and good will, let's first look at what not to do. - Never have an edge, show anger, or negativity; always convey concern for the client's needs and your organization's needs.

Transferring a Call - Click To Read Article
Essential tips on how to properly transfer a call.

Short of a Mack Truck: Keep Your Aches and Pains to Yourself - Click To Read Article
Short of being hit with a Mac truck, when you get to your client meeting, avoid telling a client about personal daily woes, particularly as an excuse for not performing.

Out of the Mouths of Babes - Negotiation Best Practices - Click To Read Article
Negotiation Skills start at any age.

Scope Creep - Click To Read Article
As you and your team get into development and implementation, you find additional needs - small and not so small add-ons that you are asked to provide or are needed to complete the project. When this happens, you, as well as everyone on your team, must be alert to \"scope creep,\" in which the project gets bigger based on new components or needs - but the committed budget stays the same!

How Is Your Phone Being Answered? - Click To Read Article
Consider these four points: Is your phone answered by the third ring? Is the greeting friendly, professional, interested and energetic? How is voice mail etiquette handled at your company? Is your voice mail answered by you and is the message up-to-date? Let’s look how one call was mishandled.

Get the Budget - Skip a Wild-Goose Chase - Click To Read Article
Before you expend days on that complex proposal or jump on a flight again to see your client or prospect, find out about the budget. While knowing client needs is paramount to maximize opportunities, knowing the budget is also vital.

Call Me - How Not to End a Client Letter/eMail - Click To Read Article
End your follow-up sales letters or e-mails with your next step.

Increase Your Win Ratio: Get to the Executive Sponsor - Click To Read Article
Deals are lost for a variety of reasons: better fit by the competitor’s product, stronger relationships, a more creative solution, cost, customer delays … Customer delays are cropping up more and more often. Certainly the economy is playing a role, but to commit, customers need more information. The problem is that much of the time the executive who will ultimately make the buying decision does not have convincing information because he or she is not involved in the process until decision time. When the executive is invisible or inaccessible until decision time, it is highly probable you won’t have reflected his or her strategic vision and therefore your solution isn’t compelling enough for him/her to commit the budget.

Getting Paid for Out of Control Projects - Click To Read Article
Overruns in scope are common. Getting paid for them is not so common.

Sales leads: the good, the bad, and the opportunity - Click To Read Article
There are cold leads, warm leads, hot leads, targeted leads. But is there a commonly accepted definition as to what a good one actually is? Jim Brodo, Richardson's SVP of sales review the various categories of a good lead and how to optimize and allocate resources for following up and nurturing the various levels of leads that are developed.

Debriefing the Team Sales Call - Click To Read Article
You are likely out in the field more often with your salespeople. Here are some coaching best practices and tips to help you make the most of your team calls and use even limited post sales call time as a learning lab through coaching. After each call, along with discussing next steps and strategy, select one area of the call and coach to it.

Chatter Matters! - Click To Read Article
Will Salesforce.com's Chatter revolutionize and accelerate call preparation, communication, sales coaching, and sharing of knowledge?

Empathy: An Endangered Sales Skill - Click To Read Article
ALL agree that empathy is the ability to exhibit interpersonal sensitivity about another's concerns and understand another person's perspective. Clearly these two abilities are absolutely essential in sales success. But is empathy is in trouble?

Virtual Sales Conversations - Click To Read Article
Linda Richardson presents a few tips to follow to help you engage in productive and professional virtual sales calls

Sales Proposal Executive Summaries: Don¡¦t ¡K Unless - Click To Read Article
Your proposal can make or break your sale. It can get you in to see the customer or keep you out. When you do include an Executive Summary in a proposal, it¡¦s the first thing most customers read. More importantly, it may be the only thing executives/key decision-makers read at all. Executive Summaries establish that all-important first impression. They can draw customers in ¡X or turn them away. Unfortunately, many Executive Summaries are neither a summary nor executive.

It Takes Two (Essential Sales Skills) to Build the Relationship - Click To Read Article
Many things go into winning a sale ¡X the fit of your solution, your sales strategy, how clearly you articulate value, your pricing, and so on. While all these factors impact a customer¡¦s decision to buy, Aberdeen, an independent research firm, in its study with 500 best-in-class companies, identified the relationship between the customer and salesperson as the #1 reason why a customer buys from a particular salesperson.

Proposal Coaching: Template and 8 Questions to Ask - Click To Read Article
Your salespeople need your support. And while they may try to entice you to write or help them with their proposals, in fact they need your support in the form of coaching, not doing their work for them.

Make a List, Delete Excuses - Click To Read Article
Selling is as much mind-set as skill set - especially today. Sure the economy has made it harder to conduct business and find and close opportunities. It has also made it harder to decipher what obstacles are due to the economy and what are due to our own performance. A 2009 DI study with 1600 corporate customers showed that customers attributed 33% of lost deals to things they feel were in the salesperson's control.

Final Presentations: It’s Not Over Until... - Click To Read Article
Great news! You've made your presentation and are one of two finalists down from six - pretty exciting, especially in light of the extended sales cycles you've been facing. Your customer has given you a date of two weeks from today when the company will announce its final decision. Your contact said he'd get back to you. What do you do in the interim to increase your winning?

Shorten the Sales Cycle - Click To Read Article
It seems as if your customers' number one goal is to lengthen it! The economy and an environment of heightened skepticism have doubled or even tripled the length of the sales cycle in many industries. So what can you do that is in your control to accelerate the close?

LEADS, LEADS, LEADS - Click To Read Article
In a more challenging economy clients’ decision processes often become more protracted. You think that salespeople would jump on every possible lead. Yet our research and experience show that, even today, many leads are too easily discounted. For example, some salespeople mistakenly discount a lead because the level of the contact isn’t high enough. Yet research shows that many opportunities begin at the operational level.

ESCALATION AS A NEGOTIATION STRATEGY - Click To Read Article
Escalation can be a highly effective negotiation strategy. Having unlimited authority in a negotiation can seem, and is, powerful, but it can be equally dangerous. If your client thinks that you have unlimited authority, he or she can read that as a green light to keep driving for more.

A SALES METHODOLOGY - Click To Read Article
Do you have a sales methodology that your team follows? What is a sales methodology? In Linda Richardson's new article, A Sales Methodolgy, Linda will review the importance of a an effective sales process and methodolgy.

Talk To Me - Click To Read Article
How are you changing your sales dialogues to encourage customers to open up to you and tell you about the impact the economy is having on their businesses and how that has changed their priorities? Customers won't really open up unless they trust you, and gaining and keeping trust is not easy in light of what most customers are going through.

Helping Customers Move Forward - Click To Read Article
Let’s focus on how you can accelerate closing by being “helpful” to your customers. What would you do in the following two scenarios to be “helpful?”

YOUR EMAILS – THE IMPRESSION YOU MAKE - Click To Read Article
Today, e-mail is probably the most common way of communicating with clients. I continue to be amazed by the e-mails that I get to see that salespeople have sent to their clients.

STICKY QUESTIONS - Click To Read Article
How should you answer an “uncomfortable” question or concern by a client that you wish you didn’t have to discuss, for example, a situation in which a colleague left your organization under difficult circumstances or negative press?

ROOM FOR TWO EXPERTS IN YOUR SALES CALL? - Click To Read Article
I read an article recently about programmers. It described programmers as program experts and their clients as domain experts. I couldn’t help thinking how customer-focused we could be in sales if we thought of clients as domain experts.

NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL - Click To Read Article
Many salespeople are reporting that it is taking them twice as long to close a sale. They also agree that there are fewer deals and, therefore, the need for them to close the deals that are in the pipeline is more acute. Certainly customers will not buy without clear value justification and trust in you. But what else can you do to increase your chances that you, not your competitor, get the business that is out there?

NO BUDGET – UNLESS OF COURSE… - Click To Read Article
Many of the customers we are talking to may be like your customers. Their budgets have either been cut or all but vanished. What can you do? Linda Richardson article "No Budget - Unless of Course.." explores some helpful tips.

LEVERAGE YOUR PREPARATION - Click To Read Article
Preparing for a sales call, while it still takes discipline and time, has never been easier. Technology (CRMs, Google, other web resources) has dramatically reduced research time. The other side of the coin is that technology has made business more instantaneous and that has put more demand on salespeople’s time.

GETTING THE STRAIGHT SCOOP - Click To Read Article
Win or lose, how diligent are you in placing a call to get feedback from your clients about why they did or didn’t choose you? There is so much to learn — whether to identify strengths you hadn’t even recognized as such that you can use to win future business, to know what appeals most to your client so you can be extra sure to deliver on that, or to correct misses and prevent them from happening to sink future deals.

DECISION MAKERS VS. INFLUENCERS - Click To Read Article
Because clients’ needs have become increasingly complex, most salespeople recognize that to meet those needs a team effort is required. Being able to gain access to team members, preparing with them, and performing in front of the client as an effective team are essential to meet clients’ broader and more complex needs.

CHALLENGING MESSAGES - Click To Read Article
Even in the best of times, change can be stressful — and these are hardly the best of times. If you are faced with announcing a less than welcome change, how you position the message dramatically influences how your sales team will hear it. The following are some ideas to help you and your team deal with the change:

ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS - Click To Read Article
KNOWING HOW TO FINESSE POTENTIALLY INTRUSIVE QUESTIONS SO THAT YOU ARE COMFORTABLE ASKING THEM AND CLIENTS FEEL GOOD ABOUT ANSWERING IS AN INVALUABLE SKILL.

A, B, C, E-MAIL OF PROSPECTING - Click To Read Article
When you’re trying to get a meeting with a prospect, the ideal outcome of your telephone call is to get a face-to-face appointment. But in spite of your skills and making a second effort some prospects will not agree to a meeting yet!





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