What percent of the buying decision is made based upon the product/solution?

The correct answer is: 30 percent!

Actually, it’s more like 29 percent, according to a study of buying habits conducted by bluewolf.com, a company that does systems integration for CRM and Sales 2.0.
According to that study, B2B decision-makers, on average make buying decision based upon the following criteria:

16 percent politics
23 percent chemistry
32 percent trust/understanding
29 percent solution

What’s exciting about this fact is that two of these elements — chemistry and trust/understanding — are very much within your control.

You can’t always influence the customer’s internal politics and, much of the time, you’re selling whatever solution your firm has to offer.
Even so, you can always use your sales skills to build better rapport and deeper levels of trust and understanding. And that’s over 50 percent of the decision-making criteria.

BTW, the above figure explain why sales efforts that focus on “features and functions” don’t work — those elements are responsible for less than a third of the decision-making process. So no way should they dominate your process.

By Geoffrey James

Your other 8 hours

Daydream Your Way to a Better LifeBy Robert Pagliarini

One of the most popular self-help books ever written on depression is feeling good by Dr. David Burns. He identifies several cognitive distortions the depressed suffer from. One of them is Overgeneralization. This is the practice of “viewing a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.” If you lose your job, suddenly you are worthless and you will never amount to anything. If you look at your 401(k) statement and you’ve lost 35% of your nest egg, suddenly you’ll never be able to retire and you’ll have to be a Walmart greeter when you’re 85 years old. When things are bad, it feels like everything is bad and they’ll always be bad.

One of the simplest, most enjoyable and most effective ways to improve your outlook and rise above the depressing headlines is to daydream — visualize a better life. In Robert Cooper’s book,Get Out of Your Own Way, he says “Brain scans show that simply imagining a complex and compelling goal will actually fire the same neurons that will be required to actually achieve the goal.” Daydreaming is definitely not just for kids. Spend a few minutes every day imagining your ideal life. You don’t have to write anything down if you don’t want to, just visualize it. Make it as real as you can.

DreamBoarding is the process of creating a visual scrapbook of your ideal life. Why pictures? Our mind thinks and remembers in pictures. We remember faces but forget names. When we read a story, we create a visual image of the characters and the situation. The great communicators use language to create mental images. A picture can communicate much more quickly and efficiently than a word or a thought.

In addition to thinking about taking a trip to Fiji, isn’t it more powerful to also look at a picture of a Fijian beach with crystal clear water and palm trees? Does the picture improve your mood more than the thoughts alone? The added benefit of creating a collage of pictures is that they can remind you of your ideal life every time you glance at your DreamBoard.

Here’s how it works. As you imagine your perfect future, jot down what it looks like. Then cut out a picture or two from a magazine that represents this life. Take your time finding pictures that get your juices flowing. If one of your goals is to own a new Porsche, buy a car magazine or visit your local dealership and pick up a brochure.
Your ideal life shouldn’t just be filled with stuff, either. It should include things you want to accomplish and ideas about the person you want to be. While it is easier to find pictures representing tangible things you want to own, you can also locate pictures representing what you want to accomplish and who you want to be.

If you want to earn a Ph.D., cut out a picture of a diploma. If you want to learn how to play the piano, cut out a picture of a piano or of someone playing the piano. If you want to work fewer hours, take a picture of your office with a clock at 3:30PM with you noticeably absent. You can find a picture for almost anything. For example, one of the things I want to accomplish is to go on an African Safari. There are a lot of places I could have gone to get pictures of Africa, but I chose to cut out pictures from an adventure travel brochure because that was more accurate for my dream.

You can even find pictures representing the person you want to be. Do you want to become a better parent? Cut out a picture of your kids on vacation or doing their homework. Do you want to be a better communicator? Cut out a picture of Barack Obama. Bottom line, no matter what your ideal life, you can find a picture to capture or express it.

Have fun with this exercise — get creative. While it might sound slightly silly-like making a collage in elementary school — using pictures will bring your ideal life to life.

Once you’ve cut out all of the pictures, it is time to create your DreamBoard. You have a couple of options. You can either create a portable goal collage by using a three-ring binder or you could create a large poster board with pictures representing all of your goals. There is nothing more powerful than looking at a collection of pictures that represent your ideal life.

Put your DreamBoard where you’ll see it often. Invest a few minutes of your other 8 hours every day to look at it. Think about what the pictures represent and visualize living it. Then get out there and make it happen!

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Can You Succeed in Sales at Your Firm?

Do you have what it takes to be successful in sales? Maybe so, but if you’re not in the right job and in the right firm, you’re gonna fail. And probably fail hard.
Here’s a quick and easy way to assess whether you’re TRULY positioned for success at your current employer.
The quiz consists of four questions and takes less than minute. And it’s foolproof. So give it a try.
Follow the link:
http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=5222&tag=nl.rSINGLE

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

A Picture worth a thousand words !

Ron Brown on How to Choose a Mentor!

Choosing a mentor should really be a long-term process of identifying the best person or persons to help you get where you want, and then cultivating a strong enough relationship with them so that asking them to become your mentor becomes an easy and natural request with clear mutual benefits.
So first you want to identify someone (and ideally, several someones, in order to hedge your bets) at your company or outside it that you think would be best positioned to help you based on their function and influence. Then you want to start establishing a relationship with them, perhaps by volunteering to work on some initiatives they’re pushing or offering some thoughts on or admiration of things they’re doing. It’s also worth developing relationships with people around this person whose opinion they respect so that you become even more of a known quantity.
Your goal is to present yourself in the most substantive way possible, rather than just having a social, “how you doing?” kind of relationship with them. Bear in mind that mentors don’t take on mentees out of altruism–they’re looking to take on valued contributors who can grow with their help and reflect well on them, as well as help them down the line.
Over time, you want to work to establish an easy rapport with this person so that when you finally do ask him or her to become your mentor, it’s a natural discussion to have. It’s also important when making your initial request to have–and be able to express–a clear idea of what it is you want your potential mentor to help you with, whether it’s advancing in the organization or acquiring specific skills or experience or what-have-you. This gives your potential mentor a way to assess whether they can truly help you and to decide whether the mentorship is worth pursuing. In my experience, many people who want mentors fail to communicate a strong sense of what it is they want out of the mentorship, and that can be an obstacle to both getting a mentor in the first place and to having a successful relationship with them down the line.