November 1st, 2011:

I recently read Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play, a great book about how to improve sales – especially business to business sales. The authors argue that the key to making your close rate and your sales increase is to really know the pains and opportunities of your prospect.  In other words, simple get et to really understand their business.  Literally you should be doing about 30% of the talking and your prospect should be doing 70% of the taking.  When you ask questions and really understand your clients, and their bosses, pains and opportunities you can then develop a solution that is built to specifically solve their pains and solutions.

This is a great win-win becuase it enables you to give your prospects something that they really want and in so doing you get to close the sale more, faster, and usually bigger.  It also enables you to save time because if you realize, early in your question asking process that your solutions can not solve your prospects problems – then you should end the conversation and move on.  What is the end result?

You spent more time on the right opportunities and less time spinning your wheels.  So you sell more.  In addition, a you sell something of great value to your prospects, in return, they are much more likely to be your happy and loyal customer forever.

On October 31st CNN broke an alarming news story…..peanut butter prices are going up 20 to 40%.  Why?  The price of peanuts is up sharply following one of the worst peanut harvests in decades.  After going trick or teating with my kids and wife tonight, it was great to come home and sink my teeth into a nice and tasty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.  Yet, as I ate the peanut butter cup little did I know that it was actually worth more due to peanut butter inflation.  It seems that with the economy being what it is all food prices have been on the climb.

The good news is that something is actually getting less expensive – merchant services processing.  We can thank the Durbin Amendment for making it possible.  Yet the fact is merchants all accross the USA are cutting their payment processing costs since October 1st.  This is just one way we can combat the rising costs of peanut butter becuase who in their right mind would ever want to say no to a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup!