No Half-Measures

By user on July 11th, 2024 in Sales Strategy
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I’m a huge fan of Breaking Bad, so parallels to the series are not something from which I shy away.

Recently, I was working with a foreign company that wanted to launch their effort in the US. The effort is not going well. Not because their product isn’t good enough for the US. In fact, it’s probably the most comprehensive product on the market. It’s not because they don’t understand the value of the US market. In fact, they are very clear that if they have any chance of future success, it will be in the US and selling to US companies.

Never ask a candidate to sell you your product

By Mark LaRosa on June 3rd, 2021 in Sales Strategy
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A very common interview tactic that I see over and over again is the “You want this job? Sell me my product!” I can’t tell you the number of times I have had to tell sales leaders to STOP this practice.

This tactic proves absolutely NOTHING about the candidate and I have no idea why anyone uses this tactic. In fact, it speaks more to the immaturity of the interviewer than it does to the talent of the candidate.

Best Questions to Ask a Candidate

By Mark LaRosa on July 13th, 2020 in Sales Strategy
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I recently read a post by my good friend Joel Petino on what the best questions are to ask a candidate. I’ve written a little about this idea in the past, but Joel’s post is great advice especially in this tough time for both candidates and employers!

https://bdstratpartners.com/best-questions-to-ask-a-sales-candidate/

“Social Selling” is not a new concept

By Mark LaRosa on June 21st, 2017 in Sales Strategy
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The term “Social Selling” has always been a puzzlement to me.  Why?  Because “Social Selling” is what selling ALWAYS WAS AND IS!?

The best sales people for the past few centuries have known that in order to sell, you need to build a brand, build a rapport, become a trusted quantity, and all of those things that somehow have become some sort of magic revelation in “social selling”.

Always Do Right By Your Prospects – It’s a LONG career

By Mark LaRosa on March 9th, 2017 in Sales Strategy
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Last week, out of the blue, I got a message from a woman who wanted to meet with me to discuss some potential business partnerships with QuotaCrush.   But this story actually starts much earlier.

Ten years ago, I was running the Northeast for a mobile marketing firm, and she was planning the mobile strategy for a Fortune 100 financial services firm.  By being persistent, I was able to secure a meeting with her, and pitch my company’s product.  I had several meetings with her over the next several weeks, and I was consistent and persistent.  At the end of the day, she did not buy the product.  It was not a perfect match for what they wanted, so we connected on LinkedIn and we went our separate ways.

Social Tools Are Making People Less Social

By Mark LaRosa on June 24th, 2016 in Sales Strategy
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Several years ago I joined an internet company as a sales rep, and in about 3 months, I became the top salesperson.  At the national sales meeting, one of the other reps came up to me and asked how I was having so much success.  I responded, “I’m honestly not that sure that I’m ding anything revolutionary.   It just seems that these people are happy to take my call and after explaining the product and how it solves their problems, they are willing to buy.”  He stared at me blankly for about a minute and then said, “…You call them?”

Never vomit on your potential customers

By Mark LaRosa on May 17th, 2016 in Sales Strategy
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While it may seem obvious that you should never vomit on your prospects, its a very common move that sales people make.

No.. I’m not referring to actually spewing your chewed Shakeshack burger onto your customer – but spewing WAY too much information.

The easiest thing to do in a sales call is to just talk and talk and talk.  Yet – this rarely leads to a sale.  When you are more focused on getting all of your points out, and less on what the customer wants to hear – you are essentially losing lots of opportunities to learn what the customer needs – and responding to that need.

Land mines: Make Your Pitch Continue to Work After You Leave

By Mark LaRosa on September 29th, 2014 in Sales Strategy
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I recently was a featured speaker at a SalesHacker event at Projective Space in New York City, and while I spoke about many topics from my book, I spoke for the first time about the topic of sales land mines and it seemed to generate quite a bit of questions both at the event and afterwards, and I realized that while I teach this method a lot, I have never written about it.

To be clear, I do not mean to make light of all of the tragedy in the world relative to land mines, but it is a term that describes a particular sales tactic well.

Your fonts need to match if you want to fool me

By Mark LaRosa on September 9th, 2014 in Sales Strategy
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I believe in sales karma.  I don’t like it when people just blatantly ignore my emails or requests for meetings and I’d rather they just simply reply NO.  So I’m very careful to never simply ignore emails and requests that come to me.

But, if I ever send a blast email, it is clear that it is a blast email.  I personally subscribe to the notion that you should be doing your homework and researching companies to make sure that you are responding in a way that matters to the prospects.  If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be spending so much time on FunnelFire.