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Selling in the Contract Service World

Selling contract services is different.

Different because services are harder to get customers to understand. Different because the contract world requires coordinating buying and selling cycles – a difficult dance at best.

Here are a number of articles that can help make selling a little less painful, and hopefully more successful and enjoyable.

Customers Must Buy

by Chris Arlen

Customers have no choice, they must buy. It just might not be you. Obvious? Overly simplistic? Sure it is, but… I was talking with someone who’s about to begin an outside sales [...]

click to continue → November 12, 2009

Crossing the Line

by Chris Arlen

When internal sales talk crosses the line to become outside customer conversation, your perspective and word-choice can leave you fully exposed and vulnerable. The words used in customer conversations are a dead [...]

click to continue → November 5, 2009

Foxes & Hedgehogs

by Chris Arlen

Woody Allen, the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, and Sir Isaiah Berlin, a 20th century philosopher. Strange group, but they all have an association with foxes and hedgehogs. I’ll make that group a [...]

click to continue → October 29, 2009

Bad Acting

by Chris Arlen

A few years ago Bill S. wrote: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” We perform, and are judged by our audiences. In business, as in [...]

click to continue → October 2, 2009

4 Lessons Learned to Significantly Improve Sales

by Chris Arlen

If asked, most service contractors would say they want to improve sales. But improving sales means changing something; the proposal, presentation, or even one’s thinking. Improvement is change. Change is difficult (healthcare [...]

click to continue → September 3, 2009

Driving Blindfolded

by Chris Arlen

There’s a sales number that’s gone missing. As a result, service contractors are blind to how well their selling. The missing metric? The win ratio (the percentage of bids won to those [...]

click to continue → August 26, 2009

3 Stages of the Buying Cycle

by Chris Arlen

All marketing and selling efforts (the sales cycle) try to move customers from indifference and inaction to purchase. However,  we tend to lose sight of where customers are in their purchase process [...]

click to continue → August 22, 2009

A Zen Koan for Selling

by Chris Arlen

At times selling service contracts can be as much fun as slamming your fingers in a drawer – over and over and over again. That painful repetition is a sign of being [...]

click to continue → July 22, 2009

Grab Revenue Now – Hold for Profit

by Chris Arlen

Welcome to our reality. The U.S. economy is suffering: GDP shrunk 5.5% in Q1 2009 and unemployment rose to 9.5% in June ’09. No one can predict how deep or how long [...]

click to continue → July 15, 2009

Buying and Selling Yorwin

by Chris Arlen

The following story is fictitious, but you’d have guessed that anyway. The marketing and selling lessons in it are true AND absolutely essential to marketing and selling anything, but even more true [...]

click to continue → July 9, 2009

Add 100s of Salespeople for Free

by Chris Arlen

Everybody sells. Even your hourly paid janitor or security guard. Whenever they’re seen or approached by a prospect or customer, they’re selling your company. Think about those 1,000s of interactions every day. [...]

click to continue → June 26, 2009

Cold Calling’s Multiple Personalities

by Chris Arlen

Cold calling has been seen as a good thing up to the ’80s and then seen as a bad thing in the 21st century. Today, nothing strikes more dread and fear in salespeople [...]

click to continue → June 20, 2009

The #1 Secret to Sell More Service Contracts

by Chris Arlen

Yes, there is a secret. Yes, there is a #1 of secrets. Yes, it helps sell more contracts, and the larger ones at that. Here’s the secret: it’s the difference between a [...]

click to continue → June 12, 2009

Selling to Procurement’s Agenda

by Chris Arlen

A current trend is for greater involvement by Procurement in service contracts of all sizes. In the past Procurement had always run large bids. Now it seems they’re running many smaller ones [...]

click to continue → June 1, 2009

Connecting the (web) Dots

by Chris Arlen

The multitude of social media is overwhelming. And trying to find their use in business to business (B2B) is even more confusing. For example, what’s all the hoopla about Twitter? (14 million [...]

click to continue → May 3, 2009

Process at the Expense of Purpose

by Chris Arlen

When the process becomes more important than purpose strange things can happen, some not so good. Even responsible managers diligently working through a process, but without defining their purpose, can cause not [...]

click to continue → April 16, 2009

Janitorial Fact & Fiction

by Chris Arlen

March 16, 2009 Unhappy Janitors at Microsoft protest subcontractor’s cuts This article points to the janitorial subcontractor’s staffing cuts and unhappy janitors because of increased workloads. It made me wonder about our [...]

click to continue → March 19, 2009

A Janitorial Fable

by Chris Arlen

Long away and far ago the cleaning contract for Ubetcha Corporation was coming to the end of its term. The contract was for millions of square feet and millions of dollars. It [...]

click to continue → March 12, 2009

A New First Consideration: An Industry’s Health

by Chris Arlen

It used to be more important to select a company to work for, rather than choosing the industry it was in. The belief was that a great company could outperform the industry [...]

click to continue → February 19, 2009

Responses to Customer-Contractor Relationship in 2009 Survey

by Chris Arlen

On January 28th we sent out a survey to get a feel for how the economy of 2009 might impact the customer-contractor relationship. This qualitative temperature check provided some interesting responses. Thank [...]

click to continue → February 16, 2009

ROI: Facility Services’ Holy Grail

by Chris Arlen

Return on Investment (ROI) is the holy grail for facility services. For managers of in-house departments or contract facility services, showing an ROI would help justify your spend upstairs. Getting budget approval [...]

click to continue → January 21, 2009

Aren’t We There Yet?

by Chris Arlen

The Green movement is no longer new. Almost everyone has heard about it, yet not everyone would be considered green. Knowing and doing are quite separate matters. I wrote the following article,  [...]

click to continue → December 4, 2008

Not For Beginners

by Chris Arlen

♦ Open heart surgery ♦ Unfreezing the global credit market ♦ Contracting / bidding on a multi-million dollar service There’s an arc of experience to things. No one is born fully knowing [...]

click to continue → October 21, 2008

Selling to Procurement

by Chris Arlen

An interesting insight came out of our interviews with Procurement professionals (Procurement Talks: An Interview with Microsoft and Expedia’s interview to be published next week). There’s not one style of procurement, but [...]

click to continue → June 27, 2008

Where You Stand

by Chris Arlen

Buyers want to succeed – sellers want the same. What’s in the way? Understanding each other. Sharing perspectives is a first step along the way to success. To that end I recently [...]

click to continue → June 17, 2008

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