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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Sales is simple and so is developing new business. Your business may be complicated but selling is not. I get concerned when a struggling salesperson or sales leader starts a conversation by explaining how complex it is to sell his services/product/solution. Typically those who tell us how complicated selling is are either confused themselves or using
Ten years ago, I was approaching the Ballas Road exit off of westbound Highway 40/64 (pictured) in suburban St. Louis when I reached the point of utter exasperation. After having tons of success and fun as both a top individual producing salesperson and as a consultant and coach to sales teams, to say that I was
I’m finally in the home stretch writing my new book on sales management. As exciting as it was to share my first book, New Sales. Simplified., with the sales world, I honestly think that this book on sales management is even more needed today. In my early days as a consultant and coach, I mistakenly believed that I
When asked by OpenView Labs to share my favorite sales tool headed into 2015, without hesitation and with a big smile, I boldly declared The Telephone! When asked by several organizations that were curating top sales influencers’ sales predictions for 2015, without hesitation and with no smile at all, I boldly declared that the air will finally and
My oldest son and I just returned from two fantastic days at Butler University in Indianapolis. Several events drew us to the campus this particular weekend. There was an admitted students reception prior to Saturday evening’s basketball game against highly-ranked Villanova, and the College of Business put on a full-day program Friday offering the opportunity to
Where did January go? Wasn’t it just New Year’s Day? Don’t know about you, but for me, the weeks flew by. In fact, the month came and went so quickly that it scared me into sitting down to review progress against my goals for the year. And that review inspired me to write this post
It’s been encouraging to see the phone making a comeback as a new business development tool. More and more sellers are getting serious about generating their own leads as they’ve realized that, in spite of the social selling “experts” dangerous preaching that everything has changed, prospecting is not dead at all. In fact, it may
Recently I’ve observed that many sales organizations’ sales problems are really more of a talent problem. It’s not just that they don’t have enough top-producers or true sales hunters, it’s that they haven’t done the hard work to truly define the sales roles in their business. A salesperson is not a salesperson is not a salesperson. There are as many
Last month I wrote a piece critiquing salespeople wearing logo shirts I was certain would cause many to throw rocks and call me names. Turns out every social share comment was positive and it ended up as my most popular post of the month. So, what do I know? Having said that, my confidence is a bit higher that
Happy New Year to you and your sales team! If you are feeling anything like I am, you are raring to get after it. Last week we took our traditional brief after-Christmas vacation, and while we were away I dove deep into goal setting for 2015. I got so excited about my plans and the possibilities that
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
