When it comes to a sales strategy, it’s important to know your competition, but it is even more important to know your potential client. Now more than ever, in this competitive market, you need to stand out amongst the crowd. What are you providing that others on the market are not? And even more important, [...]

We just announced the upcoming launch of our new CRUSH Pro Platform scheduled for release on February 1st 2011. The new CRUSH Pro Platform now enables subscribing upgraded customers to search the content of their deep dive Fortune 1000 and Global 500 CRUSH Report data in a web portal interface. The hyper-targeted advanced search is [...]

One of the most important sales enablement tools is sales intelligence; you must have accurate and up-to-date sales intelligence on your prospects. Sales intelligence tools will help you answer the who, what, where, why, and when questions in your planning process. If you have that information at your disposal, all you need to do is figure out the “how.” The “how” should be focused on relationship building. Using your sales enablement and sales intelligence tools you can start developing relationships with the key stake holders and decision-makers at the accounts you’re going after.

Business drivers are the groundwork for starting a sale. Once you know what they are, you can determine if you should go after that account or move on to the next one. Don’t try to force your solution upon a company. You probably won’t get the sale. Even worse, if you do close the sale, the solution might not live up to their standards and won’t provide the ROI they were expecting. The best approach is to ask the right questions so you can better understand your prospect’s business drivers and get a clear picture of what they’re trying to accomplish before wasting any more of their (and YOUR) valuable time.

While you may not be able to gain insight into what the company’s buying cycle is from and earnings call transcript, at the very least you can formulate an idea of what their budget might be (based on if they state that they are attempting cost reductions or will be investing more) and also what kinds of business problems they are trying to solve within the company. Being sensitive to these issues and approaching a potential sale in a new account can only benefit from empathy and a pitch that is custom tailored toward easing their woes.