Predictions for Essential Sales Skills for Selling Effectively to the C-Suite

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In his 14 years of working in Corporate America, Marcus Chan broke many sales records, won awards trips and trophies, hired/trained/coached/mentored hundreds of people, promoted to a Regional Director of Sales over 11 teams of 110+ employees for a $6.8B Fortune 500 organization, and was consistently recognized nationally as one of the top leaders in the organization every single year.

With over a decade of award-winning experience, Marcus specializes in helping others and business with the following: revenue growth, B2B sales, training, leadership development, coaching for high performance, team turnarounds, sales management, operations management, P&L analysis, strategic planning, and more.

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Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[05:23] What is it about selling to the C-suite? Why is it so difficult?

[14:13] How does one stand out of the crowd, in terms of reaching out to the prospect especially being in the C-suite?

[27:12] What are the mistakes you see in them make when they are selling to the C-suite?

[44:43] How to be persistent without being annoying?

[52:35] What’s the Golden rule?

In-Short:

Question: What is it about selling to the C-suite? Why is it so difficult?

Marcus: I think the reason it’s difficult is because people are scared of the concept of it. That’s the first piece. The second piece is, most when they start out in sales, they’re not selling the C-suite, they’re selling to the SMB market, the small, medium-sized businesses and those ones typically it’s easy to get hold of a decision-maker. If you were to physically walk-in into a decent-sized business, like an SMB business, you could probably encounter the owner, the vice president, the CFO.

Question: How does one stand out of the crowd, in terms of reaching out to the prospect especially being in the C-suite?

Marcus: I think with the C-suite, they probably get fewer calls but they get more emails. In the email, have your words right. So there’s a couple of things that are really important. Number one, regardless, whichever outreach medium you go to, whatever channel you are, do hear his mistake.

Question: What are the mistakes you see in them make when they are selling to the C-suite?

Marcus: Number one mistake I see with the sales reps is that they’re not really well organized or have a good system and that’s everything. When you’re selling to C-suite, they judge everything you do. If you aren’t good, if you’re not responsive, if you don’t call them back or you don’t set clear next steps in the process. They don’t like that.  If they do, they want money. 

Question: How to be persistent without being annoying?

Marcus: The key is, you want to be of value. It’s really important. And that’s a really overdone word. But I think it’s really important where you want to be known as the expert. 

Question: What’s the Golden rule? 

Marcus: Yes. The golden rule is to treat people how you want to be treated. 

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.