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Written by Todd Hockenberry Article from ThomasNet The mindset that leads to annoying your prospects instead of helping them stems from a selfish place. If you think about the product or service first, then the logical next step is to figure out who might need this product or service, and then attack them. Anyone who does this is not thinking about the buyers or their specific issues and goals, and is certainly not thinking about helping them first. Salespeople are still able to control the sales process, but only if they start from a position of helping. Yes, salespeople still hold a lot of cards, but they fold right away if they lead with annoying prospecting tactics. Many buyers do not know how to solve critical problems that your solution may be able to address. When dealing with more complex sales, buyers need a guide, an expert — someone with business smarts, not sales tricks — to help them navigate the competing visions for the future within their company. Buyers nee

From News From Me I have a New Concept for the Target Stores: Having salespeople who can actually sell you stuff…and this goes for Home Depot, as well. In the last month, I've had two instances, one at each chain, where I wanted to buy something, the store's computer system seemed to be doing everything possible to prevent that transaction from transacting and human beings were of little use to override it. I'll start with the Home Depot story…

Obtained From:  eMarketer After an unexpectedly strong holiday season closed the door on 12 months of "retail apocalypse" headlines, the retail industry is showing signs of confidence not seen in a year or more. But the confidence stems from something more than Christmas sales. Rather, the industry appears to have embraced the idea of consumer-centricity and moved on from the mindset of forcing a specific purchasing journey. “There is [a] building confidence that the industry is now pivoting” away from separate silos for in-store and digital sales, said Carrie Ask, executive vice president of global retail at  Levi Strauss & Co. , during a panel at Shoptalk in Las Vegas. “We don’t think of it as either/or anymore—it’s just shopping.” This was echoed by others at Shoptalk. Ken Worzel, president of  Nordstrom 's ecommerce site, said the department store is moving away from separating its ecommerce and brick-and-mortar business because the fragmented perspecti

Now that we’ve looked at advertising in Part 1, it’s time to consider the situations in which you may be directly contacting your customers to advertise or market your products, and collecting their information to do so. Collecting customer information will be done in different ways online and offline, and has a number of different legal and privacy issues tied up in it that you need to consider. Let’s take a look. Read more at bplans

You have a great product or service. Now you have to sell it. This course will give you an overview of sales plans and other tools to get your product or service into your customer/consumer’s hands. Duration: 00:30:00 Go to SBA.gov

What exactly does sales have to do with leadership? You can’t build a successful enterprise if you don’t know how to motivate a team and get them to buy into your vision. This is where the art of sales comes in. Great leaders seem to have this uncanny ability to motivate people to take action. It might appear that this ability is natural, but that isn’t always true. Leading others is a skill, one that can be learned and that needs to be honed over time. Read more from BPlans.com

Today, much of the sales process involves waiting far too long for signatures. Sometimes a deal can sit in limbo for weeks while all parties review, sign, and courier documents back and forth. This downtime causes serious risk of losing the deal, not to mention dramatically increases the risk of fraud—so what can be done to prevent that? The white paper explores how cloud-based e-signature technology can drastically reduce the time it takes to complete the deal making process and at the same time improve customer satisfaction, document security, and more. DOWNLOAD from CRM .

Sales and marketing teams both have helped break down the sales process by perpetuating leads from poor-quality customers who will never buy anything. Sales teams often dump erroneous information into the customer relationship management system without running it through marketing software to scrub the data for authenticity and other data problems. But marketers, too, have been known to pass leads on to sales departments without knowing whether they are prospects who are ready to buy... "These leads are no good," a salesperson would say, and I would say, "What are you talking about? These are great names: Look at the titles, look at the companies." And she'd say, "Yeah, but you know what? They're not ready to buy." More from Search CRM .

The restaurant industry posted its best sales results in more than two years during the third quarter of 2014, amid continuing signs of economic growth, according to the latest Restaurant Industry Snapshot from TDn2K’s Black Box Intelligence and People Report, based on weekly sales from more than 20,000 restaurant units representing more than $45 billion in annual revenue. Same-store sales grew 1.6 percent during the quarter, a 1.3-percent increase over second quarter results and the best quarter for the industry since the first quarter of 2012. The industry saw positive same-store sales for the second consecutive quarter — a first since the second half of 2012. The gain came on the heels of strong industry performance in September, when same-store sales rose 2.2 percent. More from Nation's Restaurant News .

After two major retailers, Target Corp. and Neiman Marcus, revealed that massive data breaches had compromised tens of millions of customers' data records, everyone from consumers to politicians has asked how such spectacular security blunders could occur. But if experts' anecdotes and insights on the numerous weaknesses in retail point-of-sale (POS) systems are any indication, it may be surprising major breaches don't happen more often. ... And more retail breaches are likely to be revealed soon. A recent Reuters report indicated that other retailers also suffered data breaches during the holiday season. Undisclosed sources told the news agency that "at least three other well-known U.S. retailers" were breached, and the attack techniques utilized were similar to those in the Target breach. Why are attackers currently having so much success penetrating retail environments? While some may look to cast blame on weak legacy point-of-sale security, others say reta

“What if you realize that you have indeed overpromised on what you can deliver?” The best advice when something goes wrong is to communicate early and honestly with your client. When you make a mistake, take ownership and communicate honestly. In fact, if handled properly, you might end up in a better place than you imagined. Here are common scenarios where you may need to recover after overpromising to a client. The most important thing to remember is that the sooner you can reset expectations, the better. More from Grow My Revenue

Salespeople's lips moving—that's how deals get done. Everyone talks about the importance of listening during the sales cycle; but, let's face it, no one buys from a mute salesperson. You eventually have to talk, and when you do, know this: The entire deal is riding on what you have to say, even more than what you have to sell. This article will discuss the three deadly sins of sales messaging and how you can successfully avoid them in order to create more demand and win more business. Read more from MarketingProfs .

Learn how to increase traffic, leads and sales by reaching more than 11 million people on Pinterest. Pinterest isn't just another social media network. What appears to be the fastest-growing social media site ever has become a huge traffic referral (arguably, more powerful than Google+) for all businesses. An increasing number of companies are leveraging the platform to reach a new audience, increase visits to their websites, and generate leads or retail sales. And guess what? It's working. More HERE .

Taking Things Into Your Own Hands In order to thrive in today’s digitally driven business environment, sales folks need to think and act more like marketers. I suppose to some degree this has always been true, but it is painfully so now that prospects have access to mounds of information, have tools to deflect unwanted sales messages and have the ability to freely publish both flattering and unflattering information about the companies with whom they choose to do business. So, in order to survive in this new world order salespeople need to take things in their own hands and connect much more deeply with the marketing side of things. I’ve often said that getting marketing and sales on the same page was one of the biggest challenges for departmentalized business, but now it’s become an individual challenge. In the traditional model marketing owned the message while sales owned the relationship. In the new model there can be little distinction. Marketing must get better at relation