With a maximum of 50 days left in the season, a few ideas...
1. Focus on You
Obviously, you have competitors and you’re very aware of who they are, their products and their strengths, real and perceived. Forget about the competitors at this time of year. Other than drilling down into their weaknesses, if, at this time of year, you’re just pushing against the other team, you could find yourself being steamrolled over by the end of the game. Focus on your own personal value as a trusted partner and what you can bring to your prospect’s success. Get inside their head and align yourself perfectly with their 2012 objectives. You solve their problems, they’ll solve yours!
2. Focus on Value
The issue at this time in the season is an intricate balance between the time it takes you to define “What It Is”, and the time it takes you to define “What the Value It Brings to Your Prospect”. On every major opportunity now, you absolutely need to sit yourself mentally in the chair of the buyer. What are their personal objectives? What’s in this for them? How does your product or service directly provide the prospect with specific value that is a direct link to filling their objectives?
Might be time to tune up your Value Proposition
3. Focus on 90/10 or...focus on Focus
At this time in the season, all potential orders sometimes look the same especially if your numbers of wins and losses up to this time in the season have been on the wrong side of the equation. The point here is that being behind the curve obviously provides stress, and stress results in ineffective selling processes or focusing on the wrong prospects.
Just a few things to think about…
Good Selling!
Jack
Head Coach
As most of your know, I’m a professor of marketing at Tufts. To make the content more impactful for these juniors and seniors, they get embedded into real companies in six teams of five students to solve complex marketing projects. These are semester-long projects often resulting in marketing plans, market research, segmentation and detailed recommendations. If you are at all interested in having a team of bright marketing students do a project for you, please just email me at jack@derbymanagement.com , and I will send you an outline of what's involved for the spring semester.