Here’s something to ask yourself. Are you afraid to change? Consider this quote from WH Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.” Auden accurately captured the state of B2B […]

Every day, someone somewhere is publishing a mediocre podcast episode about B2B sales. Look no further than your podcast app and social feeds for proof. If you listen closely enough, you can hear someone switching on their mic and hitting the record button. And for all those podcasts, there are listeners. In 2020, an estimated […]

Every top sales professional I’ve worked with, shared that common trait. They broke the “rules.” I’m not talking about ethical violations. I’m referring to the rules defined by rigid sales processes and methods that are forced onto sellers. Rules typically that are established by managers and executives for their own convenience. Or to operate within […]

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. According to a recent Johns Hopkins study, 26% of US adults suffered mental illness in 2020. Research suggests that mental illness among sellers is even more prevalent. And it’s been compounded by the unprecedented stresses brought on by the pandemic. And by the transition to work from anywhere that […]

Why are you wasting valuable sales time having salespeople negotiate contracts? I’ve grown plenty of high performing sales teams. I’ve never spent a dollar on training my sellers on negotiation. That’s not their job. Not to mention most sellers are horrible at it. (Though most think they are great at it.) What many sellers consider […]

What is the true purpose of AI and technology? How should it be leveraged in business? Is big data or small data better? And is this all actually improving our lives? These are questions that our Founder and CEO, Howard Brown, recently answered on the Business is Human podcast. “The idea of using technology and […]

Let your sellers sell. It’s how they learn. Jesse Marsch is the first American to coach a soccer team in the UEFA Champions League, the premier club competition in the world. He’s the head coach of Red Bull Salzburg, the top team in Austria. He’s a master motivator and incredibly thoughtful about how to develop […]

You can’t stop at hearing. You have to listen, too. There’s a significant difference between hearing and listening. We use the words interchangeably. Which is a mistake because “hearing” and “listening” have very different meanings. (Just as persuasion and influence mean distinctly different things.) Hearing is an involuntary process that detects noise (or vibrations). Listening […]

Sales has changed more in the last ten years than it did in the previous 100 years. As Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world,” and sales is on the menu too. There has been a fundamental shift leading sales teams to embrace sales automation. However, this new technology is turning sales reps […]

What we do in sales is not complicated. We find the story in every one of our buyers. There are many experts who would have you believe that sales in the B2B world is, first and foremost, a process that is freighted with complexity. While process is unavoidable in selling, it does not define it. […]

“I’m sorry.” As a child, were you ever told to tell someone that? My guess is that you were. Do you remember how it felt? You probably didn’t mean it, so it didn’t feel genuine. See, telling someone exactly what to say never really works the way we’d like. It comes off as stale, and […]

Are you antifragile? Or just fragile? How do you react and respond to volatility, randomness and disorder? I’ve been re-reading Nassim Taleb’s book: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. People usually believe that resilience is the inverse of fragility. It’s not. As Nassim writes “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and […]