After spending ten weeks on the road in Q1 (mostly doing sessions for sales kickoff meetings), it’s great to be back home. I’ve been looking forward to some office time, catching up with clients, and the chance to finally put together a handful of new engagements. It’s only midday Tuesday and I just wrapped up
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This past year I’ve consulted and coached more companies with territory manager sales forces than is typical. While personally I gravitate more toward hunting and new business development, I still love working with territory sales teams and salespeople who manage existing relationships. But recently, I am seeing several disturbing trends among many who manage territories.
I love to fly. If you’re a regular here, you know about my loyalty to and friendship with my personal Sales Force One – Southwest Airlines, and why I think Southwest is the Sales Airline. But as highly as I think of Southwest for a commercial flight, nothing compares to flying in a private business jet. Early
I’m in the midst of a month of hard sales leadership conversation after hard sales leadership conversation. It seems like in company after company we are tackling big topics and doing the necessary heavy lifting. Oh, I am not complaining. I am happy to do it, particularly because I know from experience that very often,
I love the NFL. And I love everything I know about Tim Tebow as a person. The entire Tebow story is intriguing (although probably not worthy of the amount of airtime devoted to it by ESPN over the past few years). Like everyone, I was captured by the drama two seasons ago as Tebow improbably
Last week was one of those full-life weeks, not even taking into account client workload, travel schedule or family activities. A lot of life happened last week: a dear friend’s father passed on and the incredible funeral might have been the best celebration of life I’ve ever witnessed; two of my wife’s co-workers and friends gave birth on the
It’s certainly easier to critique someone else’s work than it is to create your own. And since my last post sure was critical, it only seemed fair to follow up that rant about what I Wish Salespeople Would STOP with this list of constructive suggestions to increase new business development sales effectiveness. I wish salespeople would START… Connecting
Years ago I worked for a great sales manager who later became a business partner. Throughout New Sales. Simplified. I share many fun stories about Donnie Williams and the lessons I learned from him. Of all Donnie’s great expressions about Sales, the one I most often repeat is this: Sales is as much a matter of the heart
I am passionate about prospecting, and I love helping sales teams and individual salespeople develop new business. When talking “prospecting,” I almost immediately turn the conversation to “target prospect lists.” That’s where we start when putting together a new business development sales attack. If we are going hunting, it really helps to know whom we
Salespeople love to complain that all the customer cares about is the price. When we don’t get a deal, we’re quick to point to our higher price as a major cause of defeat. My friend Anthony Iannarino has written extensively on the topic of price, and he points out that this excuse is usually a
Warning: If you are in Sales and not making your numbers or not bringing in new business, and you spend a lot of time and mental energy “helping” out the Operations people, you are not going to like what I am about to say. And there is a good chance you will be offended, angry
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
