I will admit I’d like to see your face right now after reading this title. It wasn’t intentionally “click bait” but when sitting in a client’s office and discussing his sales process, he wrote on his whiteboard: “Prospecting: *Research *Call/Connect *FU” He immediately realized his abbreviation for “Follow Up” looked like a particularly nasty insult...Read More

So many of our blog posts and discussions are fruits derived from working through situations with sales teams in sales meetings and training sessions. I’ve written about plenty of my own selling successes and hard lessons learned but I am always in discovery mode looking for better ways to connect with clients, more effective ways...Read More

Road tripping this to a volleyball tournament a while back, I had 3 hours to spend in the car with my 12-year-old daughter. We listened to hundreds of songs on my iPod. Rolling through several decades of old and new ones. At one point, she marveled at how many songs she knew – as in...Read More

Does this sound familiar? The last several years have been pretty good. Successful, even, in the arena of sales. Strong economy. Low unemployment. Customers have been buying. You’ve competed to keep your customers. Service them well. Then, out of the blue, COVID-19. A global pandemic blows up your business base. Everything is on hold. The...Read More

Depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to, or maybe you’re cutting out a commute, you may have some extra time on your hands to refresh or reinvent your sales process and selling tools. Here’s a great place to start. This past week, I was reviewing a Pitch Deck for a young seller...Read More

So, your field sales team has become an inside sales team AND they’re working at home? How do you make the transition? Inside sales teams right now have a slight advantage in that their tools, strategy, and processes are not likely to be wildly different – except for those that were centrally located and now...Read More

Are you lagging or leading? Let me share with you a bit of my diagnostic process. When I talk with sales leaders or business owners about their sales teams, I ask, “tell me about their performance?” Their response is usually something along the lines of, “Well, we missed our target last quarter,” or “We’ve had...Read More

Over these past few weeks, I’ve had strong reinforcements of my core beliefs about sales training: Most of it needs to be, “Undone.” I see proof every day that Sales Onboarding is upside down or backwards. I see sales training that is hype, technique and manipulation-based vs skills focused. Much of the current “well-known” sales...Read More

Potatoes, Eggs, Bacon, Croissant, Orange Juice, Dolphins. See what I did there? Your brain started looking for a pattern: Food, Breakfast Foods … then, BAM. Disruption. Want to get someone’s attention? Disrupt patterns AND their expectations. Our brains are, say it with me now, FUTURE PREDICTION MACHINES and we’re constantly surveying and assessing for what...Read More

Whether I’m working with a fresh-faced new seller or a seasoned pro, one thing that almost every seller does is “underprepare” for meetings and calls. Even when they know I’m going to join them, listen in, or attend the meeting with them, they grab a blank notepad and dial or walk into a meeting. I’ve...Read More