Selling Your Good Ideas

Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Aug 29, 2006 05:44 AM

Community

Agile

Topics

Agile in the Enterprise,

Leadership

Tags

Interpersonal Communication,

Facilitation,

Introducing Agile

Naomi Karten is a consultant whose services help clients manage customer expectations, enhance their communications, provide superior customer service, and establish successful service level agreements. 

In this month's StickyMinds, Karten has written a short article which may help your new ideas actually reach the ear of your colleagues:  Developing Sales Savvy.  She notes that, while sometimes you just get lucky, there are other times when how you sell can be as critical to your success as what you sell.

She offers brief explanations of the following selling techniques, for the non-salesperson:

• Emphasize how the buyers will benefit. Speak the buyer's language.
   
  
• Accommodate the buyer's communication preferences. How does the buyer like to give and receive information?
   
  
• Help the buyer sell. Sometimes the obstacle isn't the buyer, but the buyer's superiors.
   
  
• Be a patient persuader. Some buyers simply need time.
   
  
• Build trust before you start to sell. Buyers generally don't purchase from people they don't trust.
   
  
• Learn from rejection. If your attempted sale fails, try to find out why.
   
  
• Accept that you won't always make the sale.

If these ideas are of use to you, Karten's website is full of practical information, like her "Perceptions and Realities" newsletter, and she will be keynoting at the SD Best Practices conference on September 11th, and presenting at Jerry Weinberg's AYE conference in Phoenix in November.

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   Little Red Book on Sales?

   Aug 30, 2006 1:37 AM by Thomas Van de Velde

   I can't help but to note a strong parallel with Jeffery Gitomer's work on sales. Seems like there's nothing new under the sun here. Great though to see there are some business related posts on InfoQ.

   Reply

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