I’m working on some big sales right now with my clients. I act as either a member of their team or as a key advisor. We’re aiming at accounts ranging from $500,000 to $100,000,000. This is a great part of my professional life. People hire me typically for one or more of three reasons:

1. They’re looking to “double their double.” They want to double the speed with which they can double the size of their company and they believe that landing large accounts is the way to do it.
2. They want a manageable and scalable approach to running their sales process, measuring it and improving their success rates.
3. They have a mega-sale that they want to land and they want me to be their adviser and coach. I play the role of “deal-doctor” for lack of a better description.

I’m doing all of this work right now for a variety of clients, but it just so happens that in the area of mega-hunts, we’re in a very busy hunting season.

Every one of these deals is different – different size, industry, competitive landscape, personality mix… You get the idea.

But there are a few things that each of these mega-hunts has in common…

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Hi All,

It occurred to me recently that we have a TON of free sales resources scattered throughout our site. From e-books to podcasts, and webinars to essays, we’ve definitely taken this thought leadership stuff to heart. And now we’ve gone one step further and wrapped it all up nicely into one lovely package we’ve aptly named our “Resource Center.”

So now, instead of registering for every e-book or download, you will simply register once for the Resource Center (it’s still free, of course), and you’ll never have to fill out another form again. (Registration is only required for e-books, webinars and podcasts.) Your email address will become your login, although our center should recognize you if you enter from a computer that you’ve previously used to login. I’m not one to brag (which is a trait that my marketing agency cites as a fatal weakness), but it is pretty snazzy…

In all seriousness, though, I invite you to check it out and take advantage of all of our free tools, including a brand NEW e-book that we just introduced today. (I’ll write about that separately later.) “How to Get into Big Companies for Big Sales… and What to Do Once You Get There” details a variety of new challenges that big sale hunters face and then provides extensive pointers, tips and insight that will allow them to greet those challenges head on.

I would love your feedback on the new resource center and e-book, so please feel free to email me or leave a comment if you have a chance.

Now, let’s hunt!
Tom

There are so many “experts” in the world today—people from every angle and media source. They are friends, clients, vendors, family, talking heads on TV, bleeps on Twitter, posts on Facebook and on and on…

Every once in a while it’s good to dial the noise back and ask the question: “Which voices should I let through and listen to…?” Here are my answers to that question, at least for the moment. I guess I should add that some of these voices are as much guilty pleasures as they are credible sources…
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I love my Kindle 2. Other than my iPhone 3G I don’t know if there is a piece of technology that I like better. (OK, my MacBook Pro is way up there, but I digress).

For a road warrior, it is fantastic. It holds a gazillion books, you can subscribe to mags, newspapers, blogs and other media that just magically show up. It has lots of battery capacity and it downloads books in a blink. It’s small and light, which are musts for travelers. I don’t know exactly why, but the material presented in this digital format reads faster. Sounds weird, but it really does. I read a book on speed-reading earlier in life and I think it has something to do with peripheral vision, mechanics of page turning and quantum physics. Anyway, it just reads faster.

I’m working my way through Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” currently. Sorry to say that it is not one of his better books when compared with “Blink” and “Tipping Point” but it’s interesting.

My question for everyone is what books would you keep with you at all times if you could carry hundreds of books with no extra weight? Short list for me….

• The Bible – NIV Student Edition (Worldwide bestseller, lots of wisdom, source of my faith and candidly, I fly a lot…)
• Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company (Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Shameless plug.)
• Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
• The Art of War – Sun-Tzu (Strategy cannot be overrated)
• The Trusted Advisor – David H. Maister (Brilliant professional services insights)
• The Effective Executive – Peter F. Drucker (Best executive management book out there)

What would you include?

It has all of the excitement of the big game, the high school play and your first illicit smoke rapped up in one. It’s “all you can eat night” at the adrenaline junkie café.

I’m talking about the night before the pitch for the big piece of business—it could be the final interview in an RFP process, a proposal meeting with the big prospect or the next step with your biggest client. Regardless, it’s show time and you and your team, (which could be no more than your pet, yourself and your coffee pot), are up late getting ready with all of the final details.

I’ve been through it a million times and I’ve watched dozens of clients go through it. This experience has taught me some key things that you should do to get it right in getting ready. But before I do that, let me share my worst mistakes ever…

• Opening the shrink-wrap on a software package that we had decided to use to create some of the elements of the next day’s pitch for the first time at 2am the morning of the meeting.

• Taking the red-eye from one pitch to get to the next pitch – that day I got the names, business issues and even the terms of the deal mixed up so badly that the prospect asked us to come back in the afternoon when we were a little clearer on the details (this one is so painful, almost 20 years later I can hardly write about it)

• Taking a team of the CEO, CFO and COO to a meeting on which they had not adequately been briefed, assigned roles and gone through a Murder Board exercise (see below). They spent the majority of the meeting arguing with each other on the assumptions in the presentation in front of the client.

I’m not going to tell you that you should have prepared beforehand and that it is about organization and planning, blah, blah, blah. You already know all of that and you’re still pressed for time up until the last minute. What I will tell you is that if you focus on the wrong things, you may get through the pitch well, but you may hurt your chances of getting the business.

Here are the right things to prepare …
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*A small town in southern Indiana. What did you think I meant?

The power of words…

Grab attention, communicate an idea, provoke, engage, energize… If you hunt large sales, you know that the turn of a phrase or the capturing of a concept hinge on powerful words. I just read Frank Luntz’ article “Words That Pack Power” in the November 3rd issue of BusinessWeek. He picks out five words from the executive lexicon that should be used regularly in the current business world…

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1. You’ll never have to travel back to the blog for updates again. That’s right, rather than refreshing your browser constantly to see if we’ve updated (come on, you know you do), you’ll be the first to see it, hear it, smell…Well, you get the idea. Fresh blog updates will be delivered directly to your inbox (or your blog reader, depending on what subscription you choose).

2. It’s free consulting. I know, I know…In my programs I discuss how bad it is to provide free consulting. But if I’m willing to give it away, you should take it.

3. $2.2 Billion and growing… That’s the amount of new business that practitioners of my system have landed.

4. I don’t share your information, period. In fact, unless you subscribe to my newsletter (totally different beast, here), I won’t even see your information. Either way–all communication comes directly from me.

5. Lots of new stuff coming this year:

• “Deal of the Month” podcast interview between me and a hunter who has landed a multi-million dollar deal and the backstage ways he or she did it.
• New eBooks coming out in 2009 on topics like “Reading Minds of Big Buyers”
• Online videos on how to land bigger deals faster

6. Subscriptions are designed for the commitment averse - Look, if you don’t like it, just click the “unscubscribe” button and you’re out. Now, if only relationships were this easy…