The Director of Professional Education at Iacocca Institute at Lehigh University reported she has received a great deal of praise from participants of last Thursday's live leadership conference: Questions That Lead: How to Engage Your Team and Create a High Performance Culture. The program featured proven techniques to discover what makes people tick, fostering an environment of collaboration, confronting the tough issues before they fester, and developing a customer focused mindset. I was one of the presenters along side managing partner Paul Cherry.

Performance Based Results recently completed a three-month sales-management training process with one of the largest and fastest growing electrical distributors in the Pacific Northwest and the nation. Training was initially targeted to the company’s sales force, then extended to include sales managers and leaders. On-site sales-management training workshops were presented at numerous company locations which enabled PBR managing partner Patrick Connor and me to customize each session for individual sales and leadership teams. Follow-Up sales-management training seminars were conducted additionally to ensure selling and leadership skills learned were reinforced in real-life corporate situations and scenarios.

In today’s highly competitive agricultural biotechnology sales industry, value selling is one of the more important selling skills needed by top level sales professionals. For this reason, my article, Value Selling: Getting Customers to Buy at a Higher Price is being featured in this month’s eConnect Magazine published by Dow AgroSciences.

Because growers and other industry leaders and influencers often use price as the dominant factor in a sales negotiation, biotechnology sales pros need to demonstrate that sometimes the higher price is actually a better solution — a higher value. Asking the right questions and utilizing value-added selling techniques can help biotechnology sales pros satisfy their customers without getting themselves cornered on price issues.