February 17, 2009

Despite the slowdown, some organisations are selling – so what are they doing differently

- A Dublin based services firm just this week closed a deal with a major mobile operator for a 12 month contract

- An Irish led architecture firm has closed three significant projects in the past month, 1 locally and 2 internationally

- A major life and pensions solutions provider announced a deal with a international provider of life and pension solutions last week

You may ask what are these companies doing? The answer from the horse mouth:

- “We have refocused our sales efforts and are making the necessary trade offs between what is urgent and what is a priority”

- “We have increased activity levels in existing accounts and have made everyone aware of the role they play in attracting new clients, sales is everyone’s responsibility now”

- “We could have hired 2 new sales people like our competition did, instead we decided to invest in up-skilling our domain experts in sales tips and techniques that they had forgotten. Selling is becoming a habit again”

- “We are investing more time earlier in the sales cycle to diagnose customer requirements as opposed to assuming requirements, which we did a lot of over the past few years when we had lots of projects on”

- “We are focusing on the solution the client wants as opposed to the solution we have out of the box. This is firstly showing the client we now the challenges they face and secondly differentiating us from the competition”.

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