Month: January 2021

Critical Thinking: Prioritize Customer’s Requests Efficiently – Part 1: Clarity

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Any customer facing organization deals with questions, asks and demands coming from customers. Some of them are easy to answer and some of them require investments of time and resources.

How can you prioritize them properly?

In this article I will show you how to use Critical Thinking framework to make your decision making process more efficient. I’ll share with you common mistakes in prioritization and how to avoid them.

Moreover, in many mid and large size enterprises there are two different organizations who are responsible for process of receiving customer requests and prioritizing them.

But how the process of prioritization works? Obviously, some thinking is involved here. But what impacts the thinking? What kind of techniques can we apply to do it more efficiently?

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Book Review: New Sales. Simplified by Mike Weinberg

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I have started my career as account manager for Small and Medium Businesses at mobile service provider in Novosibirsk, Russia.

While I was reading the book New Sales memories of that period of my life started to appear in my head.

It was a time full of cold-calls, sales pitches and a lot of leg work. One time per week I visited random business center where 20-30 small businesses were operating. I was going door to door, knock and start a sales call with phrase below:

“Hello, my name is Roman Gorge from XYZ Company. With whom I can talk about you Internet and mobile connectivity needs?”

Sometimes I was asked to leave immediately, sometimes I was lucky to pitch my sales story and find a new customer. There were no PowerPoint slide decks, I even didn’t have a laptop in my bag – only printed materials, my business cards, pen and notepad.

I met all kinds of people during that time – entrepreneurs, IT guys, accounting and business owners. I will never forget this difficult but great experience.

The book New Sales. Simplified provides well structured guidance how to attract new customers. It covers all aspects of prospecting:

  • How to build a sales story
  • How to create finite list of prospects
  • How to execute sales calls and meetings

Here is what I take with me from this book:

  • What is sales-oriented culture and why it is important?
  • Too many times I attended meetings where time was wasted for “Introduction” and “Company Overview” slides, but now I know how first-call deck should look like
  • How to create sales power statement and use it as a tool for meetings, cold calls and emails
  • Best practices for a sales call structure

I’m not in Sales today, but if I will one day, this book will be the first one I read again.

Total score – 5 out of 5.

Check out Reading List 2021. It has some great titles.

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