It’s okay to lose on price. It’s okay—and it’s necessary—to walk away from business where you will lose money. Your company’s business strategy requires that you walk away from this business. While there are still plenty of buyers that buy on price alone and refuse … [Read more...]

It’s easy to look at other sales organizations and believe that they have advantages that you don’t have. This is especially true when the sales organizations you compete against are larger than yours. When you look at them as someone outside their organization, you believe … [Read more...]

There are some people that can never be happy seeing someone else succeed. They believe someone else’s success makes them something less. It makes them jealous. They don’t believe that someone else deserves a success that they themselves don't already have. They mock those … [Read more...]

A lot is made of first impressions. I believe a lot should be made about last impressions, too. But whether the sales call you are making is your first, second, or twenty-fifth call on the same client, you are leaving an impression. You don’t want that impression to be … [Read more...]

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. One of the primary reasons that I use customer-relationship management software … [Read more...]

The Sales Blog Mailbag always brings something interesting. Today, I received this: “I need your motivation. Whenever I make outbound sales calls I get cold feet. The result is that I end up losing interest from the prospect.” This salesperson doesn’t need motivation. She … [Read more...]

There is a tendency to believe that when we teach, train, develop, and coach salespeople that we can we need to deliver something more than they already know, some new novelty. We mistakenly believe that the best salespeople need something new and that they will be insulted by … [Read more...]

No one wants to have any more meetings than is necessary, and especially meetings that don’t have a solid agenda and real and beneficial outcome. Scheduling regular meetings—and keeping them—helps you to produce greater results through your sales team. Create … [Read more...]

Your success as a sales leader and a sales manager depends upon your ability to achieve results through your salespeople. The more effective your sales force, the greater your results. Developing your sales force means improving their skills and abilities, and it is the most … [Read more...]

Tom Peters is fond of quoting retired Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, who once said: “If you don’t like change, your going to like irrelevance even less.” I like the opening line to one of Tom’s books, I think it was Liberation Management, just as well: “The … [Read more...]