Not sure why it took working full-time for 35 years before pulling the trigger to make this happen, but I am so thankful that I finally listened to advisors, mentors, friends, and peers telling me to do it. I recently completed my first-ever sabbatical. 30 days off… The entire experience was wonderful, instructive, life-giving, convicting,
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How much time and trouble would we save each other if we all committed to being 100 percent truthful 100 percent of the time? It’s a crazy thought, but when you really think about it, it is amazing how often we don’t tell people the truth. Sometimes we are scared. Sometimes just too nice. Or
It’s the fall Selling Season and we all running hard. My encouragement is to keep sprinting and finish Selling Season strong! We’re only a few weeks from Thanksgiving in the US and you can rest then. Recently I’ve had conversations with various sales leaders who asked what I’m working on with my eclectic group of
Nope, it’s not that your sales team hasn’t yet mastered social selling. And believe it or not, it’s not your sales process. Despite what the thousands of new purveyors of sales enablement tools tell you, that’s not the answer either. It probably isn’t even your lazy, reactive sales team who love to over-serve existing customers
Salespeople face the harsh reality today that many prospects and customers treat and view them as nothing more than mere vendors. In many cases, it’s not the salesperson’s fault. The prospect’s system, buying process, or procurement department are all set up to diminish the seller’s opportunity to create value and differentiate him/herself. It’s the reality
No, this post title is not an exaggeration, and, yes, I’m aware that I have two of my own best-selling books on the market. Even so, if you sell for a living, you must read Fanatical Prospecting now. Why am I so emphatic? Instead of trying to be creative, I’m going to answer that by letting
It’s October, and here in St. Louis that means yet another year of post-season baseball and a drop in work productivity as much time and energy is expended talking about and watching our beloved Cardinals. I was amused reading an article in USAToday last week that the Cardinals have become the new Yankees and are now
Sales thought leader Dave Brock and I are in the homestretch of a series for sales managers we’ve been writing for OpenView Labs / Venture Partners. I was honored to contribute at Dave’s invitation, and we’ve had a lot fun sharing the straight truth about sales management, offering guidance to new managers, and attempting to
Early last year I wrote a post about the The Joy of Coaching Top Performers, and just recently an individual who I worked with in the past came back and basically insisted that we resume his coaching. I tried to respectfully decline because I felt like I’ve shared everything I could with him over the
I admit it. I’m confused. Maybe I skipped the sales leadership class the day “they” taught that publishing and distributing sales reports and rankings was no longer appropriate or politically correct sales management. Don’t goals and results go hand in glove? Hasn’t business, and particularly sales, always been about hitting your numbers? Aren’t salespeople judged
The title of this post isn’t meant to be rhetorical. I’m serious. If sales managers can’t coach, won’t coach, or don’t know how to coach their people, then who is? Back in the day (I have enough gray hair now to use that expression), sales managers were the ones responsible for developing their people. Many
Sometimes the solution to our sales problem is so simple that we can’t see it. I am pretty sure that this is one of those cases. What We Want We (sellers and sales leaders) ALL crave a full, healthy (fat), balanced, moving pipeline of sales opportunities. What We Typically Do Unfortunately, most of us in
Sales Friends, I get it. We want to be liked. We want to be seen as responsive. We want to show customers that we care and that we listen and that we can follow instructions… All of those things are wonderful. But there’s just one little problem: very often defaulting to our prospect’s (or their
This is Trevor. He’s the senior executive of a company he founded in the UK. He’s also an amazing human being. I think it is fair to say that after the few days we just spent together at our Supercharge Your Sales Leadership event in Atlanta, our relationship crossed from client-coach to friends. The way
