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10. Selling 2.0 will separate the winners from the losers

When your ship is in the middle of a storm, most captains will batten down the hatches to keep things from washing away. They perceive they don’t have time to or the ability to provide their crew with new tools and skills to help them navigate the ship more successfully. Yet, the storm itself creates powerful new opportunities for those who know the best way to harness the power of the wind and waves. While others are simply hoping to ride it out, 2.0 Sales Leaders are discovering and leveraging new tools and skills to put miles between themselves and the competition. Selling 2.0 is the marriage between selling/marketing skills, processes and new web-based technologies created to advance the effectiveness of not only the sales professional, but the entire revenue generating engine of your company.

At Baker Communications, we have been helping our clients overcome the storms and outrun the competition for 30 years. Now, in response to the most complex and challenging market conditions of the past 25 years, we have created a unique and powerful set of solutions that will keep your organization flying high while others are floundering. Selling 2.0 is a set of programs and tools that will enable you to

• Quickly connect with customers to build trust and rapport
• Uncover what customers really need and want to buy without wasting time pushing products
• Create and sell value in order to counter discounting pressures
• Prepare and execute a winning negotiation strategy that will give both sides what they want
• Recruit, train, manage and retain superior talent
• Identify and take advantage of great opportunities to grow your business even during an economic slowdown
• Coordinate the efforts of your entire organization so that you save time and money while increasing the volume  productive sales contacts
• Develop a highly effective customer retention plan to reduce customer churn and preserve valuable income streams

You will not achieve tomorrow’s goals with yesterday’s solutions. Selling 2.0 is designed around your unique needs and goals, so that you can achieve the outstanding results to not just survive but thrive in the eye of the storm.

Baker Communications – 30 Years of Success

At Baker Communications, we have staked our reputation on the ability to help our clients adapt and thrive during all sorts of market conditions. Over the course of almost 30 years, we have seen trends come and go as we have worked with hundreds of thousands of professionals serving tens of thousands of business across the globe, including the world’s most respected and well known enterprises. Building on this wealth of proven success, we are able to offer unique, powerful tools to our clients today that will enable them to leverage the challenges presented by the 10 trends discussed in the previous article and convert them into opportunities for growth.

Products and Services Don’t Sell Themselves

The 10 Trends That Will Make or Break Your Sales Team clearly point to one conclusion: your success during the impending business revolution will rely – for better or worse -- on the professional skills of your sales team. Think about it this way. When the access to good information is equal, when the basic product and service lines are equal, and when the available marketing tools are equal, your company has only one other factor that can differentiate you from your competitors and give you that tiny but important edge that will keep you one step ahead. We are talking about the quality and effectiveness of the people who work for you and represent you.

Once the variables in the equation for success have been reduced to one -- the human factor -- then the formula for success rests on your ability to help your people tap into their potential to understand and work more successfully with everyone around them, including both customers and team members. This is where Baker Communications’ legacy of experience can make a difference for you and your team.

Relationships Rule

For instance, trends 1-3 –commoditization, more sophisticated customers and changing buying patterns -- demand that sales organizations become highly adept at building rapport and trust with customers. The sales process must make a drastic shift away from promoting products and refocus on understanding customer needs and goals. Sales organizations must develop sophisticated questioning, listening and communication skills, and learn to see the sales process from the customer’s point of view. At Baker Communications, we have spent decades developing and refining the most effective and respected consultative selling skills training workshops in the country. We can equip your sales teams with effective strategies to build lasting, productive relationships with their customers. Once our clients become proficient at practicing the skills we teach in these workshops, their closing rates routinely go up by at least 30%.

This strategy is also the key to conquering trend number 8 – the very real possibility of a looming downturn in the economy. A weak economy does not necessarily mean that customers will quit buying. Instead, it is more likely that customers will simply tighten budgets, postpone some purchases and refocus priorities. Sales organization that are skilled at building strong relationships based on a consultative approach will still find an abundance of opportunities to partner with customers to develop creative solutions, so that both organizations can continue to grow revenues even when everyone else is cutting back.

Training Trumps Talent

Trends 5 and 6 – a likely talent shortage and multiple generations in the workplace -- both represent significant opportunities for sales organizations to step up training efforts. Historically, one of the biggest failings among sales organizations – from local mom and pop businesses to multinational enterprises – is the neglect of consistent, targeted training programs. Instead, companies tend to provide new hires with little more than basic product training, a prospect list and a pipeline quota, and then hope for the best. It seems that, even in the 21st century, we are still hindered by the myth that great sales reps are born, not made; however, nothing could be farther from the truth.

During our 30 years of experience in helping our clients to build great sales teams, we have demonstrated time and time again that great training trumps natural talent every time. What can you do about the talent shortage? Simple – grow your own talent! We can help you take the people you already have, provide them with consistent, powerful training that will equip them to succeed, and grow an entire team of high achievers instead of relying on one or two prima donnas. Also, how do you integrate four different generations into a single team? No problem – our arsenal of workshops in sales management, team building and communication skills will provide you with best practice strategies and skills to bring out the best in everyone on your team, so that they can work efficiently and effectively as a team, regardless of those so-called generation gaps.

When Excellent Won’t Cut It Anymore

There is a very fine line between excellent and outstanding, but, in the coming business storm, only the outstanding organizations will be positioned to thrive, because they are driven to accept nothing less. Our seasoned staff of trainers, coaches and creative consultants is poised to assist you in achieving the outstanding level of success you desire and deserve, even in the eye of the storm. With a rich array of proven training modalities to draw from, Baker Communications will work with your organization to customize the perfect solution to meet your needs so you can reach and even surpass your goals, when others are satisfied to stand pat and wait for the storm to blow over.

About Baker Communications

Over the last 30 years, Baker Communications has trained over 1,000,000 professionals from over 50% of the fortune 500, including:

• 7 of the 10 most profitable
• 6 of the 10 with the highest market cap
• 16 of the top 20 with the highest revenues
• 9 of the top 10 chemical companies
• 4 of the top 5 banks
• 4 of the top 5 oil and gas companies
• 4 of the top 5 technology companies
• 6 of the top 10 telecommunications companies
• 6 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies

We conduct over 200 sales and professional development workshops each month for more than 1,000 active clients. Workshops are delivered in English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese. Our sales training experts are strategically located across North America, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. Baker Communications has the depth and breadth to improve your sales team’s productivity, increase sales management effectiveness, and help you positively impact your profitability in a slowing economy.