Podcasts
Our podcasts feature interviews with the partners at Critical Path Strategies about various aspects of sales and sales management. Many of them are sales-skill-specific; others are educational, providing "how-to" directions; and still others are industry-specific. These downloads are our most popular.
How to Conduct an Account Review
It seems that far too many times you find the account review so far down your list of things to do that you seldom get to it. But conducting an effective account review is an important part of staying on top of your accounts and opportunities. An effective, manageable, and repeatable review process helps you manage accounts, sustain important customer relationships, and achieve their goals.
How to Keep Your Best Customers
Customers look to their best sellers/suppliers as a valued resource. By deploying resources to develop relationships with those customers who are likely to respond most favorably to your offering, you position yourself to be of great value to the client and they, in turn, become your best customers.
Meeting the Cross-Generational Challenge
Is there a generational divide? We now have several age groups attempting to create new products, market to a changing population, solve problems, and work together. Each generation has a unique view of education, money, work, leadership, and family values. What's the best way to meet the cross-generational challenge within sales organizations? How do we build bridges to reconcile differences among the generations?
The Strategy of Collaboration in the Energy Industry
How can Suppliers, Procurement, and Operations start the transition toward the level of collaboration required in today’s quickly changing and more technologically advanced energy industry? Collaboration at this level really requires everyone to reexamine traditional relationships. Instead of operators declaring, “This is the way we are going to do it,” they are moving to value recognition—what specific value can each supplier bring? Instead of asking, “What is the lowest cost?”, operators and suppliers are cost sharing.
Where Does Selling End and Negotiating Begin?
High-performing sales teams repeatedly produce top results for themselves and their customers that are achieved through successful negotiations. Are these teams fundamentally better negotiators, or do they view negotiations differently? A best practice among top-performing selling organizations: They prepare for end-game negotiations at the beginning of the sales cycle and maintain that stance throughout.
Facilitating Collaboration in the Energy Industry
As quickly as the industry is changing, energy companies cannot afford to have technology acquisition and application struggle through traditional internal layers of approvers, such as conventionally structured procurement groups and established operations leadership. It has never been more important for operators and suppliers to understand each others business, needs, processes, and potential, and find the most productive common ground.
How to Help Your Company Recover from a Corporate Crisis
When a crisis strikes, what’s the best way to manage your customer relationships and help your customers maintain confidence in your company? Move quickly. Working from a position of empathy, serve as your company’s voice, communicating with your customers frequently, actively, passionately, and quickly. Unsettled customers can be turned around and, potentially, become your strongest advocates.
How to Synchronize Sales and Marketing
The primary processes that drive revenue generation are the marketing process, the selling process, and the buying process. But hindering these processes is the frequent disconnect between Sales and Marketing organizations. Too often, companies spend vast amounts of money creating marketing campaigns without input from the selling organization. The result is that viable revenue opportunities are routinely lost, and a significant amount of costs, time, and resources are consumed. Working together, Marketing and Sales have the opportunity for more success, broader reach and range in the marketplace, and a consistent, cohesive solution branding that the marketplace understands and buys.
Sales Call Planning
Sales professionals sometimes fall into the trap of assuming they don’t need to prepare for the next call because they have already made hundreds, if not thousands, of calls. But salespeople who use written call plans for scheduled appointments and phone calls get twice as much from their meetings than those they do without written preparation.
Time to Sell
To the One-Percenters—those in the top one percent of their sales organizations—time for selling is no longer limited to personal time spent with a customer. It no longer requires an appointment and an agenda. When they formulate an account plan, create a new opportunity, kick off a project, or manage expectations, One-Percenters always do it with the voice of the customer in mind. At every turn, they ask themselves, “Where can I extract value for my customer”?