Be conscious of the ripple effect in your selling. You’ve seen the ripple effect in action. Toss a rock into a still pond and the waves ripple out from the point of entry in concentric circles. It happens in sales as well. Think about a first call with a potential buyer. The challenge for you […]

Here’s a common sales problem that inflates pipelines, distorts forecasts and consumes precious time and attention from sellers and sales managers. John is working on a sizable opportunity. It would be a nice win for him and the company. The prospect is well qualified. And, in fact, supporting John on the opportunity has consumed a […]

Asking great questions is probably the most effective way to make yourself valuable to your buyers. Not talking or presenting. Asking questions. “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” So said Thomas Berger, the famous American author. Acquiring knowledge is one important purpose of asking questions. You can’t learn […]

When you think about your future in sales, what do you see? You have the obligation to invest the time and† effort to think about your future and anticipate what it will hold for you. Henri Poincare, a famous physicist, said “It is far better to foresee, even without certainty, than not to foresee at […]

There are no right answers to questions that are never asked. It’s like the old basketball adage: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. It’s been said that 90% of getting the right answer is asking the right question. I’m going to modify that statement to make it more precisely applicable to sellers. […]

Mindfulness, compassion, competition and joy. These are the four core values upon which Steve Kerr, head coach of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA, has built his teams that have achieved such great success, including winning two NBA championships. (Yes, the past couple of seasons have been tough due to injuries to critical players. […]

What are your sales biases? Are you even aware that you have sales biases? And how they are hurting your productivity? One of the primary reasons that salespeople stop improving, and start struggling, is that they begin to believe that they know what they are doing. And, they stop learning. I know it sounds strange […]

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Most everyone is familiar with the concept of a vicious cycle. It’s a repeating series of connected events in which each cycle reinforces the negative outcomes of the previous one.) Unfortunately, I often see salespeople who are stuck in a variation of a vicious cycle, that I call a Vicious Sales Cycle. A Vicious Sales […]

Stop making sales more complex that it needs to be. Here’s an example of that. I frequently get questions from sellers about how best to connect and build rapport with buyers. I turn the question around. I ask them “Did you ever learn how to make a new friend?” I’m sure that you know how […]

Are you making the false choice between learning and doing? Many sellers do exactly that. I was once asked if the reason that more salespeople don’t invest in their own development was that it was difficult for them to make the connection between investing their time to learn and their professional successes. In other words, […]

“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” That’s from the famed philosopher, Bertrand Russell. This especially applies to sales. We’re stuck on paradigms of how we sell, how we train and develop sellers and how we manage and […]