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Are you a salesperson? Do you use sales closing techniques to land a sale? If you answered yes to these questions you probably can recognize the following sales closing techniques, as popularized by Zig Ziglar:

• That price is ridiculous close
• The new decision close
• The alternate of choice close
• The persuasion close
• The three question close

Perhaps you’re using these sales closing techniques, yet your sales numbers really aren’t that good; the other sales reps in the office have better sales closing ratios, are closing more sales, and are making more money. You may find that odd as you all have access to the same amount of sales leads. You’re closing by the book yet you’re not achieving good numbers.

I think I know what your problem is You’re using sales closing techniques. STOP!!! Stop using sales closing techniques! The other reps in your office most certainly have.

Picture this you are buying a used car and the salesman asks you, “Would you rather take delivery of the car on Wednesday or on Thursday?” What would you do? You would probably think to yourself, “Does this weasel take me for a sucker? He’s using the alternate of choice close on me.”

Do you think that the people you sell to aren’t intelligent enough to see through your tactics? They are. They don’t want people to use techniques on them. Techniques are for slimy used car salesmen. They want to deal with salespeople that are genuine. And, that’s not you if you use sales closing techniques.

The way I see it, when selling in B2B, selling to Vito is like selling to Bruno, just as selling to Italians is like selling to Americans. No matter what your name or nationality people buy from people that they like. That means they buy from genuine people, not people that use sales closing techniques.

By the way, VITO, as popularized by the book Selling To VITO, is short for “Very Important Top Officer.” That means that Vito, hold a high corporate position, most likely has a high business intelligence. Don’t try to use any of your techniques on him. He’ll see right through you, as would Bruno, Tom, Daniel, Bob, Billy, Scott, or even Sandra for that matter. Assume everybody is as intelligent as you, be genuine, and you will close more sales without using sales closing techniques.

Tino Buntic invites you to visit http://www.trade-pals.com. TradePals provides free B2C and B2B sales leads without cold calling to business professionals, entrepreneurs, salespeople, and freelancers across North America. Tino also recommends Selling Power Magazine for cutting edge sales information and also enjoys reading Jill Konrath’s Selling To Big Companies blog.

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Your boss wants to see evidence that the money and resources invested in the company’s business-to-business marketing activities are really paying off. You start to sweat.

Relax. It is surprisingly easy to prove that B2B marketing is contributing to your company’s bottom line. Here’s how.

Show the relationship between your marketing and your revenue

Start by looking for sales and revenue that can be linked to marketing activities. Simply compare lists of new customers or invoices to companies or prospects in your marketing database and look for matches. You don’t have to find every sale that resulted from your marketing activities. Sometimes all it takes is one big sale to justify a campaign.

If sales haven’t closed yet, count the number of qualified leads and use estimated conversion rates and average sales size to quickly determine the sales potential of those leads. Or look at the forecasted sales in the company’s CRM system and compare them to the database of prospects, inquiries or qualified leads.

You can also send “Did you buy?” surveys to inquirers and qualified leads, using their answers to show that the prospects being targeted by your marketing are buying from you or the competition. Ask if they bought, and if so, from whom. Ask why and how much they spent. If your sample size is large enough, you can also use the answers you receive to estimate the number of sales and the amount of revenue that are represented by all the inquiries and leads you’ve generated.

Show how much you saved the company

Just give it some thought and you’ll probably come up with a list of things you’ve done to save your company money or time. For example:

- Printing and postage savings after cleaning the mailing list or delivering the company newsletter by e-mail.

- Savings accomplished by offering electronic versions of literature.

- The money you saved by eliminating non-productive marketing activities

- Time and money saved by automating the capture of Web forms and eliminating some manual data entry.

Show other ways your marketing is more effective

This can range from showing how many more prospects you reached with your marketing messages to indicating the improvements that have been made in cost per impression, cost per inquiry, cost per attendee or cost per qualified lead.

List all the marketing projects your marketing team completed

Marketers often don’t think about their own productivity when justifying the money the company invests in marketing. Unfortunately, people quickly forget what happened last month or last quarter. Or they simply have no idea what’s involved in creating a mailing or designing a new Web site.

Pointing out the number of marketing projects completed, and all the work steps involved, can be a real eye-opener to others who are completely unaware.

Always be ready to make your case

I recommend that you block out a couple of hours to create your business-to-business marketing accountability reports every month so you’ll always have up-to-date results at your fingertips. If you’re pressed for time, use an intern or temp to do it for you.

Your results may vary, but consider this …

A marketer I know recently reported to her management that awareness of their company and products among target prospects more than doubled, the cost per qualified lead delivered to sales by marketing dropped by nearly 40 percent, 58 percent of the opportunities in the sales pipeline were found first by marketing, and 48 percent of the sales closed and 62 percent of the revenue during the past 12 months came from marketing-generated leads.

The result? She received a bigger marketing budget and senior management executives no longer doubt marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.

M. H. “Mac” McIntosh, is one of America’s leading business-to-business marketing consultant and an expert on the subject of B2B lead generation. Mac’s Accountability Audit helps marketing communications, advertising and tradeshow managers increase their B2B marketing budgets by proving a return-on-investment. For more info visit http://www.sales-lead-experts.com/blog/news-audits.cfm.

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There is much confusion in the minds of many B2B orgnaisations - particularly SMEs - about the distinction between lead generation and telemarketing. Many even quite senior business professionals do not understand the distinction and see the two as interchangable terms. This article sets out to try and help clarify this situation and draw a clear distinction between these quite different activities. The article is not an attempt to argue that one is better than the other, it simply sets out the main differences between the two activities.

Lead generation campaigns consist exclusively of business-to-business outbound calling conducted by sales professionals with finely honed presentation and qualification skills and who are highly trained on the products and services they represent. Products and services are generally complex and high-value and they are marketed to high-level decision makers.

Lead generation is an interactive medium.

It is used to gather information, “qualify” prospects and generate interest. Lead generation identifies prospects worthy of a sales person’s attention by providing critical sales information, such as motivation for buying, common objections, the decision making unit (DMU), purchase process, interest level and key competitor information. In addition to appointmnet setting, effective lead generation activity provides sales people with the information they need once they are in front of the customer to close the sale.

Telemarketing is not an interactive medium.

In a B2B environment, Telemarketing campaigns are generally not used to gather information, qualify prospects or generate interest, but rather to sell such things as publication subscriptions, advertising space or exhibition space. Telemarketers most frequently represent easy-to-understand products and services and often do not receive extensive sales training. Presentations are frequently robotic and result in many ineffective calls. Volume not targeting is frequently the key to success.

About the author - Mark Brewerton is responsible for marketing at Broadley Speaking. We provide a full range of business-to-business (B2B) outbound telemarketing, telesales, sales development, appointment setting and lead generation services for our clients. In addition to our telemarketing and telesales services, where our clients want us to help them further, we also provide sales and marketing consultancy services to support the development and implementation of their sales and marketing strategy. For some of our clients, based on our own extensive experience of effective sales, we also provide sales training for their own internal sales teams. Contact us to see how our intelligent sales approach could work for you on 01822 618537 or by email to info@broadley-speaking.com or visit our website at http://www.broadley-speaking.com

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