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How can you sell more effectively in this economy? You’ll need to perform some self-diagnostics. If you use Sales Force Automation of some kind, perhaps a report like the one in figure 1.0 below is available to you.

It’s the first week of January and you have goals, a plan, some anxiety over the economy and good intentions. As you go about your work this week, what will you do that will not only make 2009 better than 2008, but make 2009 your best year ever?

If you sell, then you encounter obstacles every step of the way. There are the prospects you can’t get through to, the same ones who don’t return your calls, and those who offer so much resistance that the obstacle appears to be more like a road block than an obstacle. Then there are the obstacles of timing, competition, budget, and disinterest, along with using and happy with someone else, doing it themselves and bad experiences with your company or simply companies like yours. There is no selling without obstacles.

Last week I read a book about the one game playoff at the end of the 1978 baseball season between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. I watched that game – a very tense drama – and didn’t recover for weeks from the way it ended. I couldn’t believe that they were able to write a book that thick about a single game.

In the wake of a recent article by the authors of Provocative Selling in the Harvard Business Review an attendee challenged me to defend Baseline Selling. Since it was in the HBR, this attendee believed it had to be the better way to sell.

Especially in the current economy, one danger of selling to price conscious companies or consumers is the potential for being commoditized. If your prospect has already decided that they will buy, and the only decision they must make is who they will choose to buy from, then the “why me?” nature of your sales call will, by default, commoditize you. How can you more effectively differentiate yourself?

If you are in an industry that has been impacted by the recession, and you are doing everything possible to continue to bring in revenue, then you are working twice as hard, twice as long and twice as smart. If not, you are probably failing right now. Twice as long is plenty obvious. Twice as smart means planning the strategies and tactics you’ll use for each opportunity. But what about twice as hard? Is that working twice as hard today and tomorrow or is that working twice as hard with every prospect?