The Advanced Selling Podcast is one of the most widely heard sales podcasts on the web. Episodes released every Thursday.

Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale play host to examples, role plays, new strategies, and success stories that their listeners want to hear.

If you want to hear the complete listing of past episodes, go to Advanced Selling Podcast (.com).

Also, if you aren’t “podcasted out” we also would love you to sample Brooke Green’s podcast, The Ultimate Sales Chick podcast.

Brooke addresses a question from the audience on the role ‘attitude’ plays in the sales profession.

On any given day, there are tens of thousands of sales organizations who sit around in their strategy rooms talking about how to target the next account, how to make a conquest list, how to “get the deal off of the street.”

But I often wonder what those conversations sound like in the customer’s strategy room. It’s probably not, How do we get a deal? How do we get the Smith Group to do business with us? How do we get the value that the Smith Group has in our organization? Their strategy rooms are probably filled with discussions about how to reduce cost, how to be better operationally, how to achieve and execute goals, etc.

So my question is, how are you inserting your conversation in their strategy room? And the answer is, you probably aren’t. And you’re not because you don’t have solutions to the problem they’re talking about. It’s just you’ve never thought about your solutions in the context of what they’ve discussed in their strategy sessions.

Case and Point

We have a client in Arizona who is an electrical contractor. They know that the conversations going on inside the General Contractor’s Office are:
• How do we get the job done faster?
• How do we reduce our cost?
• How to improve safety of the jobs?
• How do we satisfy our customer so that they hire us for more business?

So across town, my client needs to be having those exact conversations in their strategy session, and then figuring out a way to insert themselves in the customer’s room. One way we recommended, and they’ve had success at, is writing a series of articles about what we know to be the general contractor’s biggest problems on the job. In this case it was safety. So my client wrote a special white paper/report on the 10 Most Common Accidents on a general job site and how to prevent them, and they did a calculation on what a 10% decrease in job time loss equated to in the bottom line.

You don’t think that was important to the customer strategy?

Then they proceeded to print the article and send it to a couple dozen contractors who they knew were having those problems. Now when the contractor passes that out inside their next strategy session, my contractor’s name will be on that material and will be seen as a valued resource to them accomplishing their strategies, not as a vendor who sells products.

So what are you doing to get inside your customer’s strategy room? It’s not all that hard as long as you think about what problems you solve in doing what you do, and how the solving of those problems leads to the customer discussion of, How do we accomplish our goals? How do we meet our customer demands? How do we grow our business? If you can do that, you now have inserted yourself into their dialogue, and everyone wins.

David Frey, who I admire because he’s one of the few of us that aren’t afraid to deliver great content, hosts a Sales Telesummit that begins next week.

Full disclosure, David asked me to be a part of it–and I told him I’d promote it to our blog readers.

There are something like 13 trainers/speakers/experts. I can’t vouch for the value of every one of them, but there are thirteen hours of content. You will be able to find something of value (in mine, I revealed a couple of things you may not have heard from us before).

It begins next week–there are three teleseminars/day.

COST: It’s free to be on each call. Or, you can pay $67 and own them all–all 13 hours. (The thing I like about this is that if you don’t like what you’re hearing, hang up and move on!)

Register Here.

The healthcare debate has reminded me a lot of sales processes gone wrong. We hear it all of the time.

Sales conversations always start with the right intent in mind (at least in my happy place they do)—figure out the problem, put a recommendation together, connect the dots so that my prospect believes in the value I will bring to the situation. Somewhere in that stream of events it seems that things go awry.

Our focus and intent goes away from helping our prospect. Suddenly, we’re more concerned about being right—concerned about beating the competition—concerned about getting our way—concerned about looking good to everyone BUT the prospect.

Who loses in this situation? Is it you, the competition, the opposing viewpoint? No. It’s the person that had the problem to begin with. When we lose our intent on fixing problems and instead focus on being right, the person we set out to help doesn’t get the best of us.

Remember what you’re “fighting” for. If you’re fighting to “get,” the majority of the time you’ll lose.