In the past, a time when salespeople were taught to behave badly, you would have been taught several tie-downs that would inevitably lead you to close your prospective client (something you were doing to them, not for them, or with them). If you…

It is sometimes difficult to think of winning a deal as an outcome. It isn't something that you do; it's the natural result of everything leading up to your dream client's decision to buy from you. Much of the time, when we talk about winning…

People often challenge me about my ideas in Eat Their Lunch, but mainly about the concept of Level 4 Value Creation and Entering the sales conversation from the right instead of the left (imagine Level 1 is on the left side of a slide, and Level 4…

Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition contains a chapter about Capturing Mindshare or, put another way, shaping the lens through which your dream client views their business, their challenges, and their opportunities. The…

I recently had a client describe me as non-slimy. Those were the words he used to describe our interaction. For this to mean anything worth exploring, you would have to believe that there is a way to be slimy in sales. Naturally, I asked for…

One of the ways salespeople were taught to uncover a compelling reason for their dream client to change or the source of their dissatisfaction, was by asking the single question, "'What's keeping you up at night?" I am not certain where this…

The current thinking on sales is that your client is either unaware of the need to change or already motivated to change, something we might have described as either dissatisfied or satisfied. Naturally, salespeople prefer their dream clients be…

When I wrote Eat Their Lunch, my editor recommended I remove the words “strong bias” from one chapter heading. In his view, the words were too charged for our hyper-political climate in the United States. I took his recommendation and instead…

Since publishing Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition, I have more than a dozen times been asked if one can start at Level 1 (the value of your product or service alone) and grow into Level 4 (the value in strategic…

Fear has no place in sales. You are now being told that you must not use any form of cold outreach to engage your prospective client. To do so, say some, is to destroy your chances of developing relationships and making your intentions suspect.…