In Conversation With: Michael Ahearne (Part 2)

Today we continue our conversation with Mike Ahearne, Professor of Marketing at the University of Houston and Research Director at the Sales Excellence Institute. An interesting finding from recent research by Mike and his colleague Tom Steenburgh is that when selling new or innovative products, successful salespeople differ from their more average colleagues in the amount of time they spend with prospects and customers.
Mike explains: “One of things we studied is how much time salespeople spend with them, and how much time they physically spend with them – in person. We did the study across all three divisions of 3M, and the way they sold, and across 86 different companies involved in B2B selling. One of the uniform findings across companies is that top salespeople spend more time in person in the first couple of stages of the buying process, that is, in the first few meetings, and then at