Author Archive | Jeff Thull

Conducting a thorough diagnosis of your customer’s business situation up front allows you to start adding value from the moment you walk in the door. It also establishes the foundation for demonstrating how your solution can provide significant, verifiable value that is truly connected to your customers’ real business.

For a few exceptional sales professionals, a well-stocked pipeline is a reality. They have been able to achieve a continuous, seemingly effortless flow of new prospects and customers, all while investing less time on cold calls. What is their secret? They have the ability to get a high percentage of their business from customer and […]

Customers are rarely to blame for long-drawn out delays. Instead, it is salespeople themselves who are the biggest contributors to the delays they find so frustrating. Paradoxically, it is the eagerness to move the sale along that leads them into the trap of prematurely presenting solutions for problems their customers don’t clearly recognize they have.

Leading thinkers in business are discovering that the traditional strategies of differentiation through product, price and service are not nearly as productive as building a solid base of steady customers who look upon them as partners — partners who seek to establish P.R.I.M.E. Resource® relationships with a smaller number of key suppliers and do whatever […]

No sales professional in their right mind would sabotage their own sales intentionally. Nevertheless, self-sabotage – the act of undermining one’s own credibility and alienating the very customers and prospects we count on for our livelihoods – occurs with dismaying frequency. In this article, I’ll focus on how to solve two sources of self-sabotage that […]

The Hippocratic Oath of a physician -“First do no harm”- is at the heart of the thinking of the most successful sales professionals. They believe that their success will come from taking care of their customers and helping them become successful. They approach their customers thinking, “How can I help them succeed?” rather than “What […]

In selling to executives, it is about establishing relevancy, credibility, and trust…all of which lead to access to people and information within the organization…what I refer to as “earning the keys to the elevator.” So how do you connect and get the keys to the elevator?

Timely and timeless tips from Jeff Thull, the author of Mastering the Complex Sale, The Prime Solution, and Exceptional Selling: How the Best Connect and Win in High Stakes Sales.

Extreme qualifying is qualifying according to the internal profile of the customer, recognizing the reality of symptoms that represent real risk.

You have made it to the high stakes world of the complex sale, and you are going to have to ratchet up your skills and disciplines if you are going to compete and succeed.