Greg’s Top 10 Sales Lessons Learned

The 10 most popular blogs over the last year and their 10 selling strategies

For those that don’t remember this tradition, David Letterman would end his monologue every Friday night with something called The Top 10 List. A very funny list for sure. In today’s article, I thought it important to review the top 10 blog articles from the last year. These articles and 100’s more are always free and available on my web site. Feel free to sign up and receive them by email each week as well, if you aren’t already. Enjoy them and I look forward to another great year of learning and sharing, Greg

#10 – Trust is the ultimate sales tool

Combining credibility, reliability and a self-vs-others mentality, we build trust to develop the relationship, dig deeper so we can help our customer. We learned how we can make deposits in the Trust Account, as well as how we make withdrawals.

#9 – There are 5 Sales Killers to look out for

Fear – Failure – Mundane – Belief – Comfort: Learn how these killers creep into your selling process and hang around until you learn to deal with them.

#8 – The #1 Salesperson Killer

After we learned what kills our sales, we next uncovered what’s killing our salesperson’s promising career.

#7 – Why Should I Buy from You?

We learned how to answer the top two questions on every customer’s mind…” Why should I buy from You?” …. “Why should I buy from your company?” You have to answer these questions before venturing out onto the farms or agribusinesses to sell your products. You need to know what makes you different than every other salesperson out there.

#6 – Knowing HOW to Sell is not Enough

In this first article, we get an understanding of the “Knowing-Doing Gap”. How we slip into the gap and how we can leap over it to put our knowledge in motion.

#5 – Using the 6^th Sense in Selling

Don’t handicap yourself by failing to use all 5 senses in your selling process. Remember, you are trying to differentiate yourself. Use every tool in the toolbox. Lastly, we learn about the 6^th sense in selling. And no, it’s not ESP. Click the link to uncover how important this sense can be to your success.

#4 – How to handle Crucial Conversations in Ag

When times are tough, you will find yourself in more crucial conversations with your customer than ever before. Accounts receivables issues, customer service issues, and farm finances will all eventually lead to those tough conversations. Learn to handle them in a better way.

#3 – How to Measure ourselves to Monitor and Motivate ourselves

Step one on the road to improving your selling results is to establish effective measures. We uncover how just the simple act of measuring is often enough to make us do better. Think about how disinterested you would be if we didn’t keep score in a sporting event. Golf without measuring is just putting around on really nice grass. Football without measuring is called the Pro Bowl, and nobody watches it or cares about it. Including the players. So, we need to monitor, motivate and make sense of what we are doing.

#2 – We learned the 5 things that top salespeople quit

Yes, winners quit! Read this article to uncover those things you need to stop doing in order to be more successful in your sales

And Greg’s #1 Top Sales Blog from this Year –

Did we learn why it takes so long to figure up our commissions? No

Did we learn why it takes so long to approve expenses? No

Did we learn why you never fill out your call reports or even log into your CRM program? No way

Did we learn why everything goes wrong with customers on Friday afternoons and not during the week when we could find someone to help fix the problem? Of course not.

Did we find out why the office never tells us when our good customer calls in a complaint and thus allowing us to walk into a hail storm the next time we call on that customer? Absolutely not.

You’d have better luck finding DB Cooper than answering those challenging questions.

The real #1 Top article is – None of us are Born Salespeople!

We dispel the myth that salespeople have some natural born talent to be successful in sales. We learn how selling is a set of skills applied in an art form. You can learn to sell and enjoy it, especially in agribusiness.