It is easy to believe that you are going to win the big deal you are pursuing. There is evidence available to you that supports this belief. For example, the contacts with whom you have met all agree that your solution is very good and that it is…

You hear, “Can you try me back next quarter? We’re really busy now.” Of course your contact is busy. Everyone is busier than ever, doing more with less, struggling to keep up with the frenetic pace of business today.

Your dream client asks,…

Doing your best work and doing your work are different. In the first case, there is an intention to work to your capacity. In the second case, you are merely engaged in an activity. Your best work is transformational, while simply going through…

Last week I wrote a post on LinkedIn. The topic was salespeople making connection requests and immediately pitching the person with whom they have just connected. As someone who believes that outreach is critical and that salespeople have been…

What if there isn’t a sales process? What if instead of a single process, there were processes that better served the prospective client and the sales organization?

What if there isn’t a buying journey? Maybe there are buying journeys, taking…

There is a reason to focus on competitive displacements, even though they take time, and even though taking a client from your competitor requires effort. When you pursue a prospective client being served by your competitor, they have already made…

There is a difference between price and cost. Price is what you pay for something, and the cost is representative of the value (of which price is only part of the equation). Some people prefer to use price as the value, eliminating all other…

Tens of thousands of years ago, in Southeast Asia, humans developed a relationship with wolves. You might imagine that as humans hunted for food that all kinds of scavengers might have followed behind them, stealing what they could and cleaning up…

There are systemic challenges, in some ways greater than earlier times. That said, a scrappy go-getter always bends the system to their will.