Recently I had the opportunity to attend a conference populated with C-Level executives. Their company size ranged from $20M to $1B+. I was fortunate to be able to interview 10 executives on the subject of sales and how they prefer to be contacted/engaged by sales people. The answers themselves were…
I have always liked the fishing metaphor for sales. There is vast opportunity, but spending time in the wrong places yields poor results. “Most of the world is covered by water. A fisherman’s job is simple: Pick out the best parts.” –Charles Waterman A rare occurrence happened the other day.
As a big proponent of Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller Habits http://www.gazellessystems.com/Gazelles-Systems-Canada , I believe that this statement from Verne applies in all areas of business; especially sales. I had the opportunity to sit down with a successful business owner the other day and he brought some interesting insights to…
An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. Jack Welch How do you take your sales successes and replicate them across the organization? According to Miller Heiman’s latest report; only a small percentage of companies actually do this; the ones…
Over the past few weeks I’ve been fortunate to have had meetings with a dozen B2B sales leaders. What struck me as interesting was that out of those dozen meetings only one of the sales leaders had a large whiteboard in his office. I’ve known this individual for a…
Sir Anthony Hopkins is one of the most respected and successful actors in the world. I was reading an article about him the other day and I was struck by his process for preparing for a play or a movie. He stated that he always reads his lines out loud…
As we meet with various sales leaders and salespeople, we are finding a common theme emerging. Many salespeople are presenting their “solution” to the client far too early in the sales process. As we dig into the reasons for this behavior we have uncovered some consistent explanations as to why Premature Selling…
Result: Something that happens as a consequence; outcome. We need more sales, more profitable sales, more of “this type” of sales etc. The common theme is that organizations know the consequence and outcome that they want to achieve. As with any outcome, it is equally important to understand the activities…
Recently I was chatting with a colleague who was down in dumps about his sales team’s inability to properly forecast the opportunities in the sales pipeline. “We have a large number of opportunities at the top of the funnel and nothing that is ready to close.” When…
I am a firm believer in the above statement. It has application to all areas of life; fitness, learning, relationships, your golf game ;-)….but of course in this context, I’m relating it to sales success. As I continuously speak with accomplished executives, sales leaders and business owners, I have found…