If you go out and look for them, it’s easy to find all the things that your company does wrong. You can also easily discover every little thing that your company might be able to do better to improve. It’s wrong to complain to your peers (and anyone else who will listen) … [Read more...]

Selling isn’t something that you can learn to do in sales training. It isn’t something that you can learn from reading books or by reading sales blogs. And it surely isn’t something you can learn in a University course. You only learn to sell effectively by … [Read more...]

One of the benefits of a career in sales is the unlimited upside earnings that come with success. You bring money into the firm and you get to keep part of the value that you helped to create. The downside for some salespeople, and it comes as a shock to many, is discovering … [Read more...]

Last week I had lunch with a client I have had for well over a decade. He is an old school salesman and sales manager. He has a small force, and he mentioned to me that they weren’t producing the results that he needed and that they he knew they were capable of producing. … [Read more...]

To succeed in sales, you have to embrace that you are a salesperson. Anything less than fully embracing the role means that you will produce results that are less than they should be. If You Don’t Believe If you don’t believe that you are a salesperson, you won’t make … [Read more...]

You call to verify that you are producing results for your new client. Your contact is already time-starved and has far too many initiatives vying for his far too limited attention. Your client is presently pleased with your performance and says: “Listen. No news is good … [Read more...]

I’ve worked for a number of people at high levels of companies, and I have had a good number of C-level clients. None of them has ever liked to be surprised by bad news or to discover an unpleasant truth on their own. Deserving trust means being candid, and telling the truth … [Read more...]

There are countless distractions that prevent you from doing the work that you should be doing to produce the results that you should be producing. There’s the chat around the water cooler, there’s the news of the day and, of course, there is the weapon of mass distraction, … [Read more...]

Our target clients and customers have been trained to negotiate price and to expect a discount. We are the ones who have been training them. We’ve done things like padding our pricing by the amount of our anticipated request for a discount, making it easy to concede. We have … [Read more...]

There are some who work in sales only because they want more money than they can easily get in a position outside of sales. They desire the money, but they have no desire to be accountable for the results. They chafe under activity goals, and they choke on their quotas. They … [Read more...]