BVS Consulting Blog

A Provocative Business Guide on Succeeding in Today’s Competitive Landscape for Senior Executives, Ambitious Entrepreneurs and Students BVS Publishing | February 9, 2016 | 136 Pages | 9781491780794 Advance Praise for “The RiVal”: “‘The RiVal’ is a great guidebook for...

As an executive, you know the basics of attending a sales meeting: arrive early, come prepared, and ask the good questions. While these things are all important, the key skill in attending any meeting is listening. Unfortunately, whether the meeting is with a single customer or with a room-filled audience, many people don’t know how to actively listen. Often, they are busy formulating what they are going to say in response, and sometimes their response or question doesn’t make sense or doesn’t relate to the subject currently being discussed. These people don’t understand that listening is a skill to be great at, and that listening skills can greatly influence your job performance and make you a better leader.

To grow your confidence in sales meetings, keep these seven points in mind and you will always be confident and in control of the meeting.

How you build your customer base (and ultimately your business) is key to your success. Do you have the used-car salesperson approach and plunge into making a sale without getting to know your customer, or do you first make an attempt to understand the customer’s needs by chatting with them before trying to land a deal?

Building a great relationship first is the most important thing you can do—It’s like money in the bank. In fact, when you establish a relationship with your customers, you have their trust, and when you have their trust, you have access to everyone on their team, all the way up to the CEO. Without a trust relationship, your business is standing in the desert waiting to die. Relationships connect your customers to the company and take the focus away from the politics of the sales process. Relationships promote a vision that you are their trusted advisor, not just another company trying to sell them something. It also promotes a vision of change and a cohesive culture that becomes adaptable to the change factor.

Wholesale telecommunications providers with small to medium-sized business (SMB) customers have a big opportunity to grow their sales exponentially utilizing today’s mobile cloud solutions such as Leapfactor’s Salesfactor™ Apps. Specifically, these smaller businesses — characterized by field teams who rely on door-to-door selling tactics, are now seeking cutting-edge ways to utilize their mobile devices to establish meaningful connections with customers and better influence purchasing decisions.

With an estimated worth of $95.7 billion by 2015, the cloud services market for SMBs is fast-growing and highly competitive (Parallels 2013 Global SMB Cloud Insights™ Report). In order to successfully penetrate this market in both EMEA and the Americas, companies need to have a deep understanding of the respective telecoms and carrier marketplaces in these regions; an effective go-to-market plan and channel development strategy; and a broad portfolio of high-value partnerships with prominent industry contacts.

By: Benjamin Von Seeger, President and CEO of BVS Consulting

The global cloud services market has seen substantial growth in the last five years, with companies turning to cloud for new revenue growth and customer solutions. This proliferation of cloud services is expected to continue over the coming years, with Gartner predicting ongoing growth across all public cloud services market segments at a CAGR of 17.4% through 2017. In addition, Gartner forecasts end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 19% in 2014 to $158 billion, reaching nearly $250 billion by 2017.