I'm often asked what are some things sales organizations can do to help increase the success of the organization. Here are five thing you can do:

1. Build relationships with the right people
2. Sell solutions, not features and benefits
3. Understand what is valuable to your customers
4. Understand what selling options you have
5. Develop an effective way to assess opportunities

Look for some additional blog posts in the next few days where I will talk about each of these in more detail.

You need to change the mindset of your sales organization. You are selling ways to significantly improve your customer’s condition not features and benefits of your product. As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

I was talking with a small business owner this morning and she was telling me how the 1-800 line for her business was down for two weeks and she figures she lost around $15,000 in sales as a result of that. I was blown away. Here are some things to do to ensure this never happens to you:

• Ensure you have a good relationship with all of your providers (phone, cell phone, email, internet, website, etc.) so it nevers takes two weeks to get an issue resolved
• Ensure you have back ups for your main methods of customer communication so if the phone or website goes down, customers still have other ways to do business with you
• Ensure that you have various ways that customers can reach you so that if one method is unavailable, they can still buy from you

This was an unfortunate situation for her, but provides a great lesson for the rest of us.