Alana Nicol

Have you ever watched a sports team play – a football team, say – and been so struck by the team’s precision, its effectiveness, and its certainty about who’s doing what, when, that you thought to yourself, “Wow! That is one incredibly talented team”?

Sandler Training Gerry Weinberg & Associates, Inc., an international training organization dedicated to professional development, has hired Andrea Bartl as Client Success Manager.

These last two months have certainly been unprecedented. Hopefully, we have survived the worst of it and can now focus on gaining momentum into recovery. It is time for us to clean our pipeline of any opportunities that are no longer going to transpire.

At Sandler, we believe now more than ever that it’s time for us to focus on what we can control. We can control our actions and our thoughts.

In sales, qualifying is such an important part of the selling process. It is impossible to qualify the true needs, pains or full decision-making process by asking closed-ended questions.

Organizational Excellence consists of what we refer to as “The Six P’s”. This roadmap to excellence includes planning, positions, people, processes, performetrics, and passion. Number four is an oftentimes overlooked, yet extremely important part in creating a thriving organization. This aspect of organizational excellence is called process.

In learning why it is so important to have a selling system, you will also learn that the buyer (prospect) has a system of their own. When the two system’s start engaging one another, it becomes what we call the “Buyer-Seller Dance.”

Organizations of all types often have “blind spots.” These are areas of business that get overlooked, and if they go unseen for too long, can result in a snowball effect of failures.

Last week I was talking with a new client about the excuses his sales people consistently give him when they failed to negotiate and win a deal. The excuse he hears more than any other was “Our price was too high.”

Last week my husband and I were watching house hunters in the evening, as we often do, and the husband and wife were describing each other’s personalities. My husband said to me “ Do you think they coach these people to be opposites?” I told him maybe but there is a good chance they are just different DISC styles.

Not everyone communicates, processes information, or makes decisions the same way. In sales, it is critical for you to understand not only your own communication style but also how to identify your prospects style and adjust accordingly.

Let’s look at an example. Gerry Weinberg is what we consider a high D style in the DISC communication model. This means he is very direct and brief in communication, very ...