Blog - Page 2 of 3 - Shade's Mills Group

Box of Donuts Selling is Over!

Through years of working in business to business sales, many of these years as a sales representative and many out working with countless other sales representatives, I came across many sales representatives that considered themselves the relationship seller. They were the route salesperson who would regularly check in with their customers, with ready access to…

Why Don’t Sales People Sell?

It is strange how you gather a number of similar experiences and begin to sense a trend. For me, all of sudden I have encountered situations where sale representatives either do not like to sell or are not capable of selling! I will offer some thoughts but I would really like to receive some feedback…

Your Next Move! Looking At Your Sales Department

The development of approaches around Business to Business (B2B) selling has continued to progress and has evolved in its concepts, strategies and practices. This sees closer alignment between sales and marketing with an emerging emphasis on content and digital marketing which in turn supports the shift from outbound to inbound selling. Buyers are now very…

A Thought Around LinkedIn

LinkedIn had long been viewed as a place to match up prospective employers and job seekers. Perhaps that was once the case, but now it has also become a very active business community. There are interest groups that match up like minded individuals in specific industries or on specific business topics. It has also become…

I Have Been A Social Selling Target

I have grown fascinated by the shift to social selling, digital marketing and content marketing in the environment of Business to Business selling. One of the more active arenas for this activity seems to be LinkedIn. Once a job seeking/recruiting platform, it is now very much a business knowledge and networking platform. I will readily…

Leadership By Walking About

In my corporate life I had managed a Canadian business. I had three sales teams, a national account team and a national distribution account team. The business environment was fast paced, intense and very consuming.Where was most of my time spent? It feels like (and I believe it to be the case) in internal meetings,…

Sales Process Versus Sales Methodology

Sales Process vs. Sales Methodology. Both are extremely important. Both are critical to setting your sales strategy.Both are often misunderstood, miscategorized or missing!Sales Process Every company engaged in selling should define a sales process. Most do not have one, do not recall all the steps/stages or it is the knowledge of very few in their…

Exploring Networking and Social Selling Through LinkedIn

I have spent a lot of time looking at sales processes and sales methodologies in the Business to Business (B2B) space. In a previous blog post I shared information on the changing B2B buyer and how they preferred not to interact with a sales representative and how they would rather do research on their own.…

Conversations Around Sales in Surprising Places

What does the sidewalk in front of my home have in common with a pub in London, England? Answer: both are places where I recently had enlightening conversations around business to business sales. Sidewalk: This seems a strange place to discuss sales strategies. Perhaps not so strange when you consider that my neighbour has worked…

Customer Churn

I was recently reading an article on the cost of customer acquisition as compared to customer retention. (You can see the article here: retention). Some quick fun facts: It costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain a current customer! 44% of companies are more focused on acquiring new customers as…