Your craft is one that is difficult to master. It requires that you develop certain character traits and a complex array of skills. Your job title suggests you are a salesperson, but there are more people with the title than there are people who…

The idea that "sales is a numbers game" contains an absolute truth worth observing. The truth is that selling requires action or "activity" if you prefer. All things being equal, more activity is better than little—or no—activity. But activity…

The first rejection of your request for time occurs when you call your dream client to ask them for a meeting. The denial of your request is the result of offering too little value for the time you are requesting (if what you offered was valuable…

Modern, professional B2B salespeople have as much in common with Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross as modern marketers have with get-rich-quick internet marketers. Yet, there are still those who believe salespeople are pushy, self-oriented, and…

Creating new opportunities in B2B sales means capturing mindshare, shaping the way clients view their business, their challenges, their opportunities. Mindshare also means consulting and providing advice around the decisions where your business…

When you start in sales, you need deals. One deal is as good as another deal, a perspective that is helpful because you cannot learn to sell without actually selling. As you progress in gaining sales acumen, you also acquire the business acumen…

We consistently present sales processes and the buyer's journey as linear processes, when we depict them on a slide as a direct path, beginning on the left side and ending on the right. Viewing concepts like the sales process or buyer's journeys…

Not too long ago, people believed the most significant changes in business-to-business sales were the internet and the social channels. Both the internet and social media were supposed to change sales forever, eliminating salespeople—along with…

Sales is a contest, a competition. Because this is true, selling is about creating a preference to work with you, your company, and your solution. The greater the preference you create, the more likely you are to win. For our purposes, we are…

The idea of "value creation" can be confusing. The word "value" itself can be nebulous, unclear. Value is also in the eye of the beholder; it is a perception. In sales, however, we can define "value creation" with some significant level of…