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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Last week was one I won’t forget. We kicked off the 2012 Fall Selling Season with several client sales teams, and reached the long-awaited publication date of my first book, New Sales. Simplified. The book had been available for several weeks at amazon.com, and even with pre-orders trickling out in a frustrating fashion instead of
The “sales story” is our most important sales weapon. By “story,” I mean the collection of talking points we use to communicate when selling. Most executives and most salespeople I meet don’t have a consistent, compelling, succinct, differentiating, customer-focused sales story. That’s mind boggling to me, because pieces of “the story” are incorporated into every
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you! I could not be more thankful. And I’d like to take this opportunity to demonstrate it. We have been blown away by the response to my new book New Sales. Simplified. – The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development. The feedback from CEOs, sales executives, sales gurus, reviewers
Not sure about you, but seeing this fall foliage picture gets my pulse up. After the summer we’ve had here in St. Louis, I’ve never been more ready for fall and football! But there’s another really important aspect to fall, and with just a week to go until Labor Day, it is time for my
Here’s reality: very few salespeople prospect for new business. And even fewer do it effectively. There are lots of reasons that’s the case, but one stands out above the rest. Fewer and fewer salespeople have a working knowledge of how to prospect! Many in sales today don’t prospect because they never had do to it and a
There is a lot of noise and confusion about prospecting in the sales world. It’s always been hard to get salespeople to prospect for new business — even when proactively pursuing strategic target accounts was widely accepted as a valid method for acquiring new customers. Today, the false teachers, many from the Sales 2.0 movement,
There’s a lot of talk about “niceness” today. Employees are often judged on whether they play nicely with others or what kind of team member they are. Listen, I’m all about culture, and I love being part of a team – a winning team. But everyday I see supposed sales killers choosing to play good corporate
When I share my “Not-So-Sweet 16 Reasons Salespeople Fail at New Business Development” with new client sales teams, this issue usually generates the most angry faces in the audience. No one shoots spitballs at me when I point out failure resulting from a lack of focus against a strategic, finite target account list. And everyone smiles
We hear it all the time. “This is a relationship business.” Or, “It’s all about the relationship.” I’ll ask someone about their selling style, and quite often, the proud reply is “I’m a relationship salesperson.” Those answers sound good and are usually accepted at face value. But you know what my experience shows – particularly
We just returned from our family vacation. It was a great time at an all-inclusive resort just south of Playa del Carmen. As my son and I were reading in the setting pictured above, he smiled and said it looked like we had found our Corona TV commercial spot. All-inclusive resorts seem to have a
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
