Category: Sales

The folks at Mother App turned The Sales Blog into an iPhone App. The app is free, and it brings you the feed from The Sales Blog and my Twitter account.

Download the app by clicking the TSB image in this post, or clicking here.

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Last night I joined a conversation on Jim Keenan's new Talk Shoe program called Sales Smack. (the call was recorded and is still available online). The topic of the show was Is Sales Responsible for Company Growth? Because of prior commitments, I…

"I don't want to come across as selling."

"I don't want to be perceived as being a salesperson."

"I don't want to sound sales-y."

These three comments trouble me. Deeply. They are all real, and I encountered all of them in the last week. They…

In Yesterday's post, Deals Stalled? How to Stop Taking Yourself out of the Sale, I wrote about the danger of agreeing to something that limits (or eliminates) the salesperson's ability to influence the outcome of the decision to buy their product…

Too often salespeople cause deals to stall because they take themselves out of the sale (or because they let themselves be taken out of the sale).

What does it mean to be taken out of the sale? It means you agree to something that allows the…

Tuesday's post, The Truth About Why Salespeople Don't Like Cold Calling, continues to generate no end of comments (both in agreement and violently opposed). A few comments have suggested that cold calling is ineffective when calling the C-suites.…

One of the comments I received from a reader earlier this week brought this idea to mind. It stuck with me. Her comment was intended to elevate the field of telemarketing over telesales. But the real difference in her defining of the two fields…

Yesterday's post, The Truth About Why Salespeople Don't Like Cold Calling, generated all kinds of feedback, mainly falling into two camps. The first camp is the "cold calling is effective" camp, all of whom have had enormous success using cold…

There are two groups of people who cold call: telemarketing firms and professional salespeople. For telemarketing firms, cold calling is what they do. For professional salespeople, cold calling is one tool in an arsenal of many tools (or at least…

The Checklist Manifesto is a new book by Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande is a general surgeon at the Bringham and Women's Hospital in Boston and writes for the New Yorker. This book is a continuation of an article he wrote a couple years ago in the same…