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Excerpted From How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies To Outsell Your Competition and Win The Big Sale
1. Make a business-oriented portal your home page. Set aside twenty minutes each morning to scan the news about your top three customers, clients, or prospects and their top three customers, suppliers and competitors, including current stock quotes and financial information.
2. Read the 10-Qs and 10-Ks of your most important customers and their most troublesome competitors. Focus on financial measurements and business strategy, then base your discussions with executives and senior managers on these.
3. Over a two-month period, ask several trusted friends, partners, colleagues, or mentors to give you their objective and candid observations on your behaviors and other professional issues. You have to be willing to hear the truth and to make necessary adjustments in the way you see things.
4. For professional growth, escape your "comfort zone." Try the following:
Deliver a speech at an industry or association meeting
Call a stock analyst who follows your customer's industry and offer him insights into that industry.
Cold-call twenty-five CEOs.
Walk away from a sales "opportunity" that's not likely to turn into business.
Learn about your prospect's three top products, as well as those of their three key competitors, then talk about what you learned on your next sales call.
Refuse to answer an RFP until you meet with the CFO of that company.
Invite your company's CEO to breakfast and pitch to him a logical, well-researched strategy to achieve a corporate goal.
5. Make self-education a habit. Regularly read the following:
"Business savvy" publications like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek. All of these magazines have web sites.
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