We have discontinued our weekly Sales Builders newsletter, but there are still hundreds of excellent sales-building articles on the Strong Closer site. We encourage you to access them, when:
- You are wrestling with a difficult selling situation and need fresh ideas.
- You are a manager seeking a good topic for an upcoming sales meeting.
- You feel yourself sliding into a slump and need to regain your sales momentum.
- You just want to start off your week with a fresh idea you have not tried before.
Below is your index of the full content of the Strong Closer Site.
WHAT MAKES YOU A STRONG CLOSER?
Strong Closers are sales professionals who achieve the greatest success, while creating a base of satisfied customers who make repeat purchases and serve as the best referral sources. We interviewed hundred of the most successful B2B and high-end consumer sales professionals to create this list of traits that most of them share.
STRATEGIC CONSULTATIVE SELLING
Big-ticket, long-cycle selling calls for a great deal of strategic planning to ensure you develop and implement the optimal consultative selling process for each prospective customer, as we must for every individual involved in the decision process.
In sales, every word you speak or write makes a huge difference. Learn written and verbal sales and marketing communication skills to win more customers.
One of the most difficult parts of a career in selling is the need to constantly refill your sales pipeline with new, qualified prospects. The articles here help you develop your prospecting strategy while also sharing expertise on multiple different ways of growing your prospect pool.
Once you’ve built a pool of qualified prospects, now begins the most complex process: correctly identifying each prospect’s needs, presenting solutions that perfectly address those needs, and then expertly completing the myriad steps to finally close the order. All are selected to help you optimize every step in your sales cycle.
BUILDING AND USING SALES TOOLS
Web sites and social media, webinars and PowerPoint presentations, telephone and email, brochures and personal letters. These and many other sales tools are essential to your processes of educating your customers, helping them decide among alternatives, and finally making the decision to buy.
Professional selling is a wonderful career for those who fully embrace its potential. It is also a difficult career, requiring you to amass great market, industry and product knowledge — as well as interpersonal communication skills — while also dealing effectively with the extended dry periods that often take place between the big wins.
CUSTOMER SERVICE AND RETENTION
For most businesses, more than 50% of all future business is directly attributable to the satisfaction of current customers. These companies understand the direct linkage between their customer service programs and numerous reorder, up-sell, cross-sell, and referral sales opportunities.
In large companies, all branding and marketing activities take place in separate departments from the sales organization. But if you are a small business owner, or an independent rep who doesn’t have such dedicated departments, you need these ideas on how to build your own marketing programs.
If you are in sales management or are a business owner, you probably handle selected major accounts yourself, and that work keeps you very busy. Yet you must balance that responsibility with sales rep recruiting, sales training, sales coaching, plus motivating and rewarding your sales team – including both your full-time sale force and your independent representatives and distributors.
SALES TIPS FROM STRONG CLOSER READERS
We share great tips from active professional salespeople and managers, covering all aspects of selling, customer service, marketing, sales management and sales career development.
DISTANCE SELLING AND MANAGEMENT
Covid-19 caused most of us to use remote forms of communication more than we ever had in the pat We discovered new tools and became more effective with familiar ones. For most of us, these tools and techniques are now permanent parts of our our sales toolkit.