Sales Process

There are four predictable steps that impact all major purchase decisions. Do you know what they are?

This article’s title is intended as the highest possible compliment. If you’re a sales leader, and your team is producing, I really do believe that’s because of your ability to do what an air traffic controller does.

The goal of creating a better buying experience is to make it easier for people to buy. In this podcast, we will discuss the importance of follow-up after an initial discovery call or demo, and how sales reps can use tools like Qwilr to progress conversations.

Joe Ippolito joins to talk about the Upfront Contract.

Here are three simple things you can do, starting today, that will immediately upgrade your 30-second commercial.

The Sandler Summit is a powerful two-day hybrid event where successful business professionals across all industries learn, collaborate, and network.

The referral generation process we are about to share with you can transform your month, your quarter, your year, and your career. It should be at or near the heart of your prospecting plan. Learn it! Practice it! Use it! Share it with your organization! 

You may not realize it, but your team’s CRM can help you to overcome the “winging it” problem, standardize your team’s sales process, speed up sales cycles, improve close ratios, and increase revenue.

High performance sales teams we work with are adopting a hybrid selling approach to leverage the best practices of both in-person and virtual selling.

Mike Montague interviews Hamish Knox on How to Succeed at Trials and Demos.

In an enterprise sale, where there are lots of moving parts, things can get complicated. Here are four best practices we share with our clients.

There is clearly a limited supply of raw materials and finished goods around the world at the moment.

“Please just send me a better proposal, and when you do, give me your bottom line. I don’t have time to go back and forth. Just get me your best number.”

George Carlin did a bit once about words that included the phrase, “it’s the context that makes them good or bad.” The bit *hasn’t* aged well, but his words are prescient when it comes to techniques learned in training.

Mike Montague interviews Rachel Shi, Senior Manager of Partnerships at Vidyard, on How to Succeed at Video Selling. 

Will we eventually be able to return to the pre-pandemic ways of conducting business? That’s a question that’s been on the minds of many professionals.

You don’t need us to tell you that we’re all working from a distance these days. Thanks to COVID, professional salespeople are, for the most part, not seeing buyers in person.

Mike Montague interviews James Abraham on How to Succeed at Neuro Selling.

Remember the childhood game of whispering a phrase to someone and asking them to pass it on? By the time it reached the fourth or fifth person, the meaning of the original phrase was lost! Then, it amused us; in customer care, it can be costly.

Mike Montague interviews Jason Campbell, Host of Impact at Work and Superhumans at Work, a Mindvalley Podcast. Author of Upcoming book on Selling with Love, on How to Succeed at Selling with Love

Mike Montague interviews Anneli Thomson, Sandler trainer and member of Team Great Britain in the triathlon, on How to Succeed at Gold Medal Selling. 

Mike Montague interviews Dr. Mark Goulston, podcaster, speaker, and author of Just Listen, on How to Succeed at Selling More by Listening More.

The old distinction between “field sales” and “inside sales” is an increasingly irrelevant one. Today, the most effective and productive sales teams see themselves as remote sales professionals.

We live in an era when virtual selling has, in many industries, all but eclipsed face-to-face, in-person selling.

For as long as there have been salespeople, there has been data to analyze about the process they use to bring in business.

The results of the Sandler Research Center survey The Essential Components for Sustaining Overachieving Sales Performance are out.

This year, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the book, Dave will revisit each of the original 49 Sandler Rules and give updated takes on their relevance to salespeople and sales leaders.

Mike Montague interviews Rich Isaac on How to Succeed at Understanding the Decision Making Process.

Back in the 1930s, in the wake of the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression, there was a social phenomenon in the United States known as the “Hoover Garden,” sometimes called a “Depression Garden.”

David Mattson, President and CEO of Sandler Training and 6-time Author, talks about his Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best-selling book, The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them.

Mike Montague interviews Hamish Knox on How to Succeed When the Sale Goes Sideways.

This year, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the book, Dave will revisit each of the original 49 Sandler Rules and give updated takes on their relevance to salespeople and sales leaders.

Mike Montague interviews Doug Cohen on How to Succeed at Using Body Language in the Sales Process. 

How do your prospects feel after sitting across from you in a sales call?  Maybe the answer doesn’t come instantly to you. That’s OK. Here’s another question: Ever been to therapy? Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question… but it’s OK if you have. A career in sales can certainly lead to an occasional need for a therapist! 

Mike Montague interviews David Brown on How to Succeed with the Sales Software of the Future.

There’s been a lot of interest in recent months in the topic of sales enablement. What is it? Why does it matter? How does it work? And how can it benefit your organization?

In the complex world of enterprise accounts, team selling is the name of the game. When it comes to winning, selling to, growing, and serving major accounts, team selling needs to be much more than just a tag line. It needs to be the way you do business.

The real question here is how an effective retail salesperson can have better conversations while reducing pressure. How do we make that happen in retail?

In today’s world, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting more powerful and more prominent in the sales process. What does that mean for professional salespeople? There used to be an occupation called “switchboard operator” – now there isn’t. Fifty years from now, will there no longer be an occupation called “professional salesperson”?

Brian Sullivan interviews Oksana Esberard about Mindfulness in Selling.

Hope, the saying goes, is not a strategy. Wise words! But are you perhaps relying on hope a bit too much after you and your team lose a major account?

Mike Montague interviews Haley Haggerty on How to Succeed at Rethinking the Sales Profession.

Mike Montague interviews Jurgen Strauss, marketing innovator and host of the Innovabuzz podcast, on How to Succeed at Marketing to Your Ideal Client In this episode:

Give our podcast a listen to learn the right steps you need to take in order to create a sales playbook for your team.

Mike Montague interviews Doug Cohen on How to Succeed at The First 30 Seconds of a Prospecting Call. 

Mike Montague interviews Wayne Dehn on How to Succeed at Overcoming Childhood Messages.

Mike Montague interviews Dan Stalp on how to succeed at redirecting prospects’ head trash. 

This year, on Fridays, Dave talks about the attitude, behavior, and techniques of successful sales managers as he shares his thoughts on the 49 Sandler Rules for Sales Leaders.

In his book Blink, author Malcolm Gladwell contends that people make their best and most accurate decisions in the first two seconds of facing a situation—in other words, in the blink of an eye. It seems inherently suspect, though, this notion that people can make correct decisions quickly. Is it? You were probably taught from an early age that haste makes waste; don’t judge a book by its cover; and look before you leap.

Mike Montague interviews Nema Semnani on how to succeed at storytelling. In this episode:

• The right attitude for effective storytelling
• Imagined realities are powerful motivators
• How to tell a compelling story

This year, on Fridays, Dave talks about the attitude, behavior, and techniques of successful sales managers as he shares his thoughts on the 49 Sandler Rules for Sales Leaders.

Mike Montague interviews Carlos Garrido on How to Succeed at Asking for Referrals In this episode:

• Why do we struggle to ask for referrals?
• Attitudes to help you get business from referrals
• Give referrals to get referrals

Selling to major accounts, also known as enterprise accounts, is radically different from selling in other spaces. For one thing, the major account selling cycle is a continuous process – continuous because there’s no end to the cycle of selling to and serving large accounts. And the streams of transactions over time between buying and selling organizations constitute a client journey with a distinctive itinerary along a clear roadmap, a roadmap that delivers value on an ongoing basis.

Here are five simple ways we can improve the quality of our communication with the people who are currently buying from us and expand and deepen those relationships over time.

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We know all about the importance of team selling, don’t we? It's that powerful strategy in which multiple team members from different functional areas of a selling organization work collaboratively to win deals. Especially in the enterprise world, team selling is widely implemented.

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An interview with Chris O’Connel on How to Succeed in Starting Out in Sales.

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In sales, we all bundle our accounts, clients and prospects, into logical groupings to add clarity and understanding to our efforts. We use vertical categories, assembling together our healthcare, consumer products, technology accounts, and others. We also differentiate by geography, adding efficiency in territory management by bundling accounts based on physical locations. 

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This year, on Fridays, Dave talks about the attitude, behavior, and techniques of successful sales managers as he shares his thoughts on the 49 Sandler Rules for Sales Leaders.

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If you are a leader in your organization, it’s a pretty good bet that you count on the members of, say, your accounting team to use the same terms and the same methodologies when they are collaborating to complete their work. For instance: You assume that when one person on the accounting team refers to the “cost of goods sold,” they mean the same thing as everyone else on the accounting team.

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Most salespeople who need to prospect for a living will tell you that it’s a very proactive, immediate results-driven exercise that can be uncomfortable at times. Hard to disagree with that. This is a topic that we get involved with far too often as it’s a common point of frustration for many business owners and sales leaders regarding their selling culture.

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Potential buyers of your product or service – like the rest of us – spend a lot of their time online. This gives rise to a question: What are the best ways to engage with them when a voice to voice or a face to face conversation isn’t a possibility? Here are five simple, effective steps you can follow.

The 2019 Sandler Summit, which took place at the Rosen Centre in Orlando, Florida, was the best-attended Summit yet, both in-person and online. We covered a lot of ground, but I’d like to share with you two takeaways, in particular, from this year’s Summit.

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This strategy involves face-to-face contact with people you already know, and thus isn’t technically an example of digital prospecting. Even so, it’s a best practice we use and have coached others to use as a means of generating substantially larger numbers of referrals via LinkedIn.

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This is a truly amazing period of history for sales professionals. The information tools that help us to identify, connect with, and sustain ongoing relationships with buyers are more powerful than ever, and they allow us to do things few could have imagined just a few years ago. But there's a challenge we all face: We mustn't let the extraordinary technology we now have blind us to the importance of having a clear sales process.

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Hamish Knox, Sandler trainer from Calgary and two-time author, shows you how to succeed at overcoming common objections in the negotiation process with the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques needed to be more successful in sales. Get the best practices collected from around the world for overcoming these common negotiating tactics.

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Let’s start by talking about the elephant in the room: Cold calling is almost every salesperson’s least favorite topic. In fact, the only two groups who like the idea of cold calling are those who have never done it and sales managers.

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Many women ask me about the best ways to break down the barriers faced by female sales professionals. Here’s my answer: the critical step is recognizing that how we perceive ourselves before, during, and after our sales conversations will always have the most dramatic impact on our ability to break down the barriers we encounter. 

Think about your last purchase, why did you make the purchase?  Perhaps the first things that come to mind are, "It was on sale, so you saved money," "it will allow you to get things done faster," or possibly "it will improve your health.”  These are logical reasons.  The reality is these are not the reasons you bought, it is how you justify the purchase.

Are your sales presentations more like a Gettysburg Address or a Gettysburg Oration? Few people know that President Lincoln was actually the secondary speaker at Gettysburg. The program for the dedication of the Gettysburg Cemetery, four months after the famous 1863 battle, listed Dedicatory Remarks, by the President of the United States after Oration, by Hon. Edward Everett, the main speaker. 

Jeff Schaffner, Senior Business Developer at Acro Media Inc and host of the Exploring Ecommerce podcast joins Mike Montague to talk about how to succeed at ecommerce. Is digital disruption threatening your business model? Learn how to lean into and succeed in ecommerce with the creators of Sandler.com and our online shop

Sean Coyle, Sandler trainer, prospecting expert, and David H Sandler Award winner talks about how to lower defensive walls and build rapport quickly in a sales call. Learn the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of master salespeople and prospectors who can quickly and easily build trust with their prospects.

Prospecting is the lifeblood of a successful sales career... but many salespeople overlook the basic behaviors that support a consistent prospecting routine. Here are the five necessary behaviors professional salespeople need in order to become successful at prospecting.

Learning how to communicate more effectively with people who have different communication styles than you do will lead you to more prospects, more productive discussions, and more sales.

Learn how to find the science and systems in the soft skills of selling. Karl Schaphorst discusses the latest and best practices for the sales profession. Learn the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques behind the science of selling. 

We’re sometimes asked what the bare minimum should be in terms of digital prospecting ability for an individual salesperson. Below, our list of five things we believe every salesperson, operating in any industry, should be able to do in terms of digital prospecting. If for some reason you can’t do this much right now, you should learn how, and sooner rather than later!

Learn how to measure and properly quantify your prospecting efforts with Sean Coyle, one of Sandler's top prospecting experts. Sean makes thousands of outbound dials each week with the help of ConnectandSell and he knows how to make each one count. Listen in as he discusses prospecting best practices with Dave Mattson, President and CEO of Sandler Training.

“In the dark of the night, every cat’s a leopard.” This old Indian saying provides great insight into enterprise selling, because it reminds us how important it is to identify the information that matters most about our key competitors… We must know them, prioritize them, and account for them. That means conducting a truly effective, and customized, competitive analysis. Unfortunately, most research sales teams do in this area falls far short of the mark.

There are numerous components which determining a seller’s success. Near the top of this contributing-factor totem pole, is behavior. If an individual cannot execute proper behavior, they will struggle to find high levels of achievement. Behavior, the action we take towards our goals, is the blueprint for success in the sales world. Following through on these plans, however, is easier said than done. A large contingent of the salespeople routinely makes the three mistakes listed below. 

Matt Rister, Sandler trainer, talks to Dave Mattson about the ins and outs of the HVAC industry. Matt has experience in the industry and talks about how to succeed at selling the Sandler way in heating and air.

Today’s sales professionals find themselves facing unprecedented, and often uncomfortable, change. More and more salespeople have larger territories than they used to have, and are responsible for selling a wider range of products and services than they’ve ever sold. They've got a lot to do, and they usually have less time in which to do it than they had last year.

In this special bonus episode, Dave Mattson talks about a common problem with sales presentations. If you wait until the end of the presentation to close, you put too much pressure on you and the prospect. Learn how to prevent this pressure and succeed at giving sales presentations.

Pete Oliver and Dave Mattson talk about executing the Sandler budget step and how to talk about money on the sales call. This Selling the Sandler Way episode is all about how to break our bad budget habits, and effectively talk about money in the right way at the right time of the sales process.

If your goal is to find more prospects, get more and better referrals, and make more commission dollars in 2018 than you did in 2017, consider upping your social selling game. Here are four quick tips that will help you to avoid some common mistakes online.

Dave Mattson, CEO of Sandler Training, talks to Hamish Knox, Sandler trainer and two-time author of Accountability the Sandler Way and Change the Sandler Way, about working through the decision timeline with a prospect. You will learn why decision is a part of the qualification process with a client and what you can do about it.

This article discusses concepts and strategies from our No Guts, No Gain assertiveness program. This self-study program was designed from David Sandler’s teachings on goal-setting, getting tough, and avoiding game and powerplays.

When prospects ask you a question (or use wishy-washy words, or try to mislead you, or use smokescreen tactics), wouldn’t it be nice if you knew for sure what their true intention was? David Sandler developed a tool to help the salesperson accomplish exactly this. It’s called reversing.

Paul Lanigan from Sandler in Dublin, Ireland share the dangers of social selling and how to find success. Learn the difference between social marketing, social networking, social prospecting, and social selling. Find social selling success with these tips and tricks for maximizing your social media.

Welcome to Selling the Sandler Way, with your host Dave Mattson, the president and CEO of Sandler Training. He is a five-time bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and consultant to hundreds of international organizations. In this show, he talks to other Sandler trainers about the Sandler selling system.

You’re a salesperson. You’ve just checked the wall calendar. You realize that the third quarter is officially over. A chill runs down your spine, because you know this means that you are 75% through the year and you haven't yet come close to the track you need to be on to achieve your yearly goals.

Rule number 29, don't chase purple squirrels. Stay focused and stick to the agenda during sales meetings. People are pretty predictable and purple squirrels are defined as things that they throw onto a meeting that has nothing to do with the topic. 

Welcome to Selling the Sandler Way, with your host Dave Mattson, the president and CEO of Sandler Training. He is a five-time bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and consultant to hundreds of international organizations. In this show, he talks to other Sandler trainers about the Sandler selling system.

Welcome to Selling the Sandler Way, with your host Dave Mattson, the president and CEO of Sandler Training. He is a five-time bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and consultant to hundreds of international organizations. In this show, he talks to other Sandler trainers about the Sandler selling system.

Welcome to Selling the Sandler Way, with your host Dave Mattson, the president and CEO of Sandler Training. He is a five-time bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and consultant to hundreds of international organizations. In this show, he talks to other Sandler trainers about the Sandler selling system.

Greg Nanigian, Sandler Trainer and Author, wrote his first book, Why People Buy. It’s a must-read for any sales professional in your organization who isn’t in control of the customers’ buying process, is unsure of what motivates clients and prospects, or needs to enhance their chances of closing the deal.

Welcome to Selling the Sandler Way, with your host Dave Mattson, the president and CEO of Sandler Training. He is a five-time bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and consultant to hundreds of international organizations. In this show, he talks to other Sandler trainers about the Sandler selling system.

Antonio Garrido, Sandler trainer, and new author of Asking Questions the Sandler Way joins us to talk about the best sales questions. You will learn his favorite questions, the right attitude for asking questions, and why you should be asking more and better questions in the first place.

Welcome to Selling the Sandler Way, with your host Dave Mattson, the president and CEO of Sandler Training. He is a five-time bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and consultant to hundreds of international organizations. In this show, he talks to other Sandler trainers about the Sandler selling system.

In this episode of Selling the Sandler Way, Dave Mattson, the President and CEO of Sandler Training explores the Sandler Selling Philosophies behind the Sandler Selling System with Chuck Polin, a Sandler Trainer.

In this episode of Selling the Sandler Way, Dave Mattson, the President and CEO of Sandler Training explores the Sandler Selling Philosophies behind the Sandler Selling System with Rich Isaac, a Sandler Trainer.

Today we're talking about the top sales challenges that we face as individual sales producers. We have different types of people who listen to the show. Certainly short selling cycles, long selling cycles, transactional consultative. It's all over the board. Some do sales and service and some just do sales. At the end of the day, we all have challenges and a lot of these challenges that we have fallen into some general areas.

Welcome to the How to Succeed Podcast. The show that helps you get to the top and stay there. This is How To Succeed at Selling Girl Scout Cookies. The show is brought to you by Sandler Training the worldwide leader and sales management and customer service training. For more information on Sandler Training, including white papers, webinars, and more, visit Sandler.com.

There are several significant challenges that sales representatives and sales teams face in selling into complex enterprise accounts. One of the most daunting is that enterprise sales cycles can be long and drawn out. Months and years can pass while pursuing an opportunity with an enterprise organization. And as the time passes, the doubt, uncertainty, risks, and costs add up. And this draining of resources goes beyond the financial.  The human assets applied to an enterprise pursuit and the overall energy of the selling organization are also casualties over time.

Gabe Larson, Director of the InsideSales.com Labs and host of the Sales Acceleration podcast, joins us for a special conversation about the end of the month. Gabe's team has just released new information about the best and worst practices of sales teams at the end of the month. Learn what to do and what not to do to make the most of the last few days of the quota period.

Welcome to the "How to Succeed Podcast." The show that shows you how to get to the top and stay there. This is "How to Succeed at Preventing Objections."  The show is brought to you by Sandler Training. The worldwide leader in sales, management and customer service training. For more information on Sandler Training, including free wi-papers, webinars and more, visit Sandler.com and look under the resources tab.  I'm your host Mike Montague and my guest this week is Joe Ippolito He is a Sandler trainer from Boston. And we're gonna talk to him about how to succeed at preventing objections. Joe, welcome to the show. Tell me a little bit about objections and why you picked this for a topic and who should be paying attention today?

In working with thousands of salespeople and sales managers, a consistent area of concern they have is to improve on their stall and objection handling skills. When prospects say things like “we’re not quite ready,” “your price is too high,” “were staying where we are,” “you do the same thing my current supplier does,” I could go on.

Fear may be the most powerful motivator affecting your buyers’ decisions. However, in their effort to maintain an image of power and control, buyers will be reluctant to share their true anxieties and concerns with you. You’ll increase your sales production when you help buyers discover and overcome their fears, show that you are sensitive to those issues, and then lead those buyers to the conclusion that your product will replace their fear with peace of mind.

After Thanksgiving, many of us sales people feel fat and happy, and decide to pull off the throttle and take some down time. After all, nobody really wants to talk to sales people, make decisions, or think about expenditures. Right? Wrong! The little known secret is that the holiday season is a fantastic time to assemble a powerful framework that builds your business, and sets you up for a great first quarter.

By focusing on tracking activities in a Customer Relationship Management software, you can evaluate which things influence prospects to move forward in your sales process. Understanding exactly what’s moving a deal forward will help you decide the best next steps you should take to close any similar deal in the future. Tracking activities also highlights the telltale signs that a deal might be slipping away, and helps you pay it the proper attention to keep it moving forward. 

People buy emotionally; we’ve all heard that. But what does it mean? It means that people make buying decisions emotionally; they justify these decisions intellectually. To further understand this concept, it helps to know who is making the decisions and who is justifying the decisions. 

Too often, sales professionals make one fundamental mistake that could be costing them thousands in commissions. They believe that their job is to sell products or services to clients by explaining why their product is superior. Success in sales (and the size of your commission check), is determined not by the information you give, but rather, by the information you collect.

All salespeople with a small amount of experience have a 30-second commercial (a.k.a elevator pitch, popcorn introduction, etc.) down pat. And that's the problem.