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 […]

In sports, coaches help develop the athlete’s and the team’s strengths, identify weaknesses, put together plans to improve performance, and drive them to perform at their best. All elite athletes at the top of their game have coaching. In fact, all professional musicians also have coaches. And all movie stars have coaching. Virtually everyone at […]

I read so much nonsense about relationships in sales. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been writing about this more recently. (I admit; I get triggered by it…) The problem many writers and commentators have is that they can’t get past a single definition of a “relationship” as an “emotional bond between people.” (AKA a friendship.) […]

Sellers have to invest the time and effort to think about their future and anticipate what it will hold for them. How will your markets, buyers, companies and careers be disrupted and transformed by rapidly changing technologies and evolving buying behaviors? What will you have to learn today to be ready for tomorrow? I’ve spent […]

Your victories and failures do not define you. Unless you let them. In sales, we experience victory and failure in roughly equal measures. It’s the nature of the beast. All of our victories, and failures, are transitory. The joy and pain equally fleeting. If you hit quota one month, on the first day of the […]