All They Want is Sales

Most of my phone calls lately is How Do I Generate More Sales? It's getting tougher to sell telecom. For years it was all about "Saving 10%". Now that's not enough. There have been SOOOO many companies that have screwed the consumer - think SunRocket, Norvergence and any bankrupt CLEC - that enterprise customers (whoever that is!) are sticking with the proven names - AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, and Level3. (Disclosure: I rep for all 4).

I am doing a series of conference calls for telecom sales folks called How To SELLECOM (based on my book of the same name.) the next one is August 1 with Host.Net's Lenny Chesal on How to SELLECOM Collocation.

I have also been doing a series of posts on my marketing blog at marketing idea guy dot com about Lead Generation. It isn't as easy as it used to be. Shaving some points off their bill is going to work today. It has to either be a large savings or you have to have a Big Differentiator - one thing that both CLEC's and VoIP Providers lack. Sales is a Process, just like Marketing and both have to be Planned and Executed regularly. (That's part of the problem: not much planning, not much executing, forgetting the basics.) If sales were baseball, you would need a ballpark, gloves, 10 people, bats, a ball, a home plate, and some skill. In sales, everyone with a phone thinks they are good to go. And sales IS like baseball. In baseball, if you do it right 3 out of 10 times, you are a great hitter. In sales, if you close 3 out of 10 leads you are making a decent living.

In baseball, there is practice, practice, practice. Do you do that in Sales?

In baseball, even in Little League, you have a coach. Do you do that in your sales career - get a coach? Again probably not. So no coaching. No training or practice. No equipment. Just out there swinging away. That's why so many companies need help.