Be Bold and Smart as You Ask for Executive Level Referrals

Are you one of many salespeople who hesitate to ask for referrals?

It is a shame because referral selling is the easiest way to grow your business. Resolve to get over your reluctance (whether from fear of rejection or fear of appearing too aggressive) and plan how to ask using the best advice from executive selling training experts.

• Believe in yourself and the value you bring. If you have built a solid relationship with your client through delivering true value with proven business results, you should have faith that your product/service deserves to find other users.
• Invite your client’s help in thinking through the people they know who might benefit from your offering.
• Suggest targeted categories of potential targets…by their industry, function, title, geography, and business issue. You want to make it as easy as possible for your client to come up with qualified candidates.
• Be specific about next steps. Talk together about how you would like to be introduced.  Getting introduced via phone, in person or email is critical.  Everything else is just a cold call.
• Follow-up.  And always, always thank your client for the referral and follow up with a report of the meeting results.

4 Immediate Steps to Fine Tune Your Executive Selling Machine

Are you, along with over 50% of those companies surveyed, suffering from rapidly increasing sales and marketing expenses?

These increased costs quickly eat into your margins and negate the profits you had hoped to achieve. It is time to fine tune your executive sales “machine” so you can reduce costs and realize greater profits.

Here is what executive selling training professionals recommend:

1. Know your sweet spot and identify your ideal customer so you win more often, as well as establish a repeatable (and more economical) sales process. You won’t waste time or money on chasing deals that are either unlikely to succeed or are just one-of-a-kind.
2. Use your resources more effectively. Send specialists in early and then rely on generalists to pursue and clinch the deal.
3. Train back office personnel to do as much as possible to support the sale on the front- and back-end so salespeople are reserved to do what they do best.
4. Make sure your compensation is aligned with and supports the sales team’s business goals.

Create a Joint Sales Plan to Sell to an Executive

Like many in our industry, you are probably required by your sales manager to set out a plan that outlines how you will approach and complete each major deal in your pipeline.

But have you ever created a plan in partnership with your customer that shows, step-by-step, how you will proceed?

Executive selling training professionals recommend a joint sales plan to improve the accuracy of your sales forecasting. If you and your executive buyer collaborate on a timeline for the deal, you are unlikely to be blindsided by delays that you did not foresee but were known to your client.

A good plan, jointly created, also establishes who will do what when. You predict what needs to happen at each stage. Once your client agrees with your draft plan, you can together determine who is responsible for the completion of each step. Add a timeline for action and you have a sales plan which can guide the entire sales process.

If your executive buyer (or those around them) are unwilling to engage in the process, that is warning sign that both the relationship and the deal are at risk.

Time is Money for Executives

If you are lucky enough to have earned a slot in an executive’s schedule, use it well. Understand that time is an executive’s precious resource. It can never be recaptured so they must allocate their attention to only the most pressing issues.

The do’s and don’ts from executive selling training gurus:

• Do focus only on big number items. Don’t waste time and effort discussing lower budget or priority problems or issues.
• Do raise relevant topics if they stand in the way of your sale. Don’t ignore potential problems thinking they will disappear…these are the obstacles that can poison the deal.  Be upfront and honest.
• Do include team members who have special expertise in the product/service you are offering so you have a subject matter expert on hand to answer technical or detailed questions. Do not neglect to involve your team if a team sell would be more effective…you just need to prepare well for this kind of session and practice together.