From the category archives:
How many times does this happen? You build the perfect DECK. (That’s slang for SLIDE DECK for some of you—LONG, BORING, MEANINGLESS POWERPOINT for the rest of you.) You rehearse it. You know it in and out. You anticipate OBJECTIONS and have an armory’s worth of ammunition to overcome them. You get to the meeting [...]
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What makes someone a great sales performer? Here are a few ideas: THEY THINK BIG: High performers think beyond the transaction—they think long term, big picture and any other overused corporate jumbo you can think of. You get it. THEY WORK: While I don’t believe effort = output, I do believe there is a positive [...]
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Typewriters. Seen one lately? Used one in the last 11 years? The answer above is “probably not.” If you had polled an audience in the 1960’s and asked if they thought typewriters would someday be “extinct,” I’d suspect the vast majority would say, “NO WAY. How could we ever live without typewriters?” And here we [...]
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If I Had a Million Dollars–this is not only a great song by Barenaked Ladies, but also a predominant thought of many highly commissioned salespeople. In the “money” portion of our sales training programs, we often ask the question: “who wants to double their income?” or “who wants to make a million dollars this year?” [...]
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I can’t stand when people don’t take accountability for their outcomes. Sales managers, I don’t know how some of you do it – listening to excuse after excuse after excuse after excuse…you get the picture. I know many CEOs want nothing more than to create a more ACCOUNTABLE work team. But no one has seemed [...]
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I’m sure many of you have struggled at some point in your sales career to find the contact information of a key prospect. Think about this situation. Your manager asks you to contact the CIO of a major insurance company. You know the guy’s name and company, but that’s it. Your likely strategy: cold call [...]
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Recently in our SELECT (advanced sales training) program, we got into a conversation about getting to the right person in the sales process. As we went down the path, it became apparent that it was less a technique issue and more of an attitude issue on our part. I went back in to the studio [...]
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In my observation of sales people, I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone falls on a continuum between highly skilled professional and poorly trained amateur. The people at the latter end of that scale are not bad people–they are just badly trained. And nowhere does it become more apparent than when the sales person talks [...]
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Have an upfront understanding prior to a sales call. I’ve been called on by a lot of sales people over the years. And few–very few–ever tell me what the call is going to look like. They never send an agenda upfront–they never tell me the process they’ll use–they never tell me what the outcome could [...]
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Have you ever seen a bad resume? I haven’t. And it’s time I did. Let me tell you why. Every resume reader is skeptical of what he reads. Here’s what I think when I read a glowing resume: If this guy were that good, then why is he looking for a job? Or, “if he’s [...]
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