Door Opening Refined: We shared with you in the past what attributes of a sales person, customers find important. After conducting our own survey, we've noted some validation from a March 2005 report published by Celent. In their report titled, What's Wrong with Insurance IT Sales Practice, and How to Fix it, Celent noted there is ample frustration with the vendor community because of the disconnect between their expectations and the qualities sales executives actually bring to the table. It boils down to this: senior executives want you to know their company, their business issues, and their industry; lower level players want you to be flexible and responsive. This of course is not much beyond Solution Selling 101; however, the underlying conclusion tells a different story - i.e., sales people know what to do and aren't doing it! Do your homework! Collect data from around the company, know how your solution addresses pressing company concerns, know how your solution impacts a customer in his market, make it easy for the customer to buy. It isn't complicated, but if you do it, you separate yourself from all those sales execs who know what to do, but are too lazy to invest the front-end time.

Who Is In Your Patch? Don Tapscott spoke to the LOMA/ACORD conference in Orlando last month and had some very interesting insights into where the global market is headed. He termed it, "The Naked Corporation" and described an age of coming transparency. It made a lot of sense. With the incredible availability of information, companies have fewer and fewer places to hide their weaknesses. This means two things: your company had better be in great shape and your customers had better be in great shape - they will face transparency too. He walked through the variety of things driving this move to transparency (we won't go into them here, buy the book), and boiled it down to the idea that as economic momentum increases, decisions and changes happen more rapidly, necessitating better information flow and integration, which elevates the need for transparency among stakeholders. So, how does this affect you? If it takes you a month to get the OK to share information with a prospect and your competitor shares it out of the gate - who just won that battle in the quest to build trust? When a customer needs to be able to demonstrate transparency, how important does data integrity, access to information, and seamless integration become? Give this idea of transparency some thought so you are not caught off guard.

Separating Yourself from the Pack: Are you doing anything special in the area of Business Development? We've spoken with several candidates who have gotten pretty creative in demonstrating their value to prospects by going a little beyond typical prospecting approaches. For example, have you considered hosting an invitation-only breakfast with a prominent speaker in a cutting edge area? If you could get five key decision makers in one room to round table a hot topic, how much would that be worth? Not only do you learn about their view point on the topic, you elevate your value to them by including them in a dialogue they wouldn't otherwise be having. Find ways to do things differently and people will remember you.

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Elite Sales Professionals is an executive search firm specializing in high-level sales and sales management searches, primarily for postions selling technology and services into the Insurance, Financial Services and Healthcare verticals. If you would like to correspond with us or submit your resume, please e-mail us at .

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