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In Tom Peters’ The Little BIG Things, on Item #46, he makes the point that “Everything Passes Through Finance.” It’s such a important, yet too often ignored critical success factor for sales people. In virtually every situation, Finance is always somehow involved in the sale. Sometimes, it’s ju Read More

I’m constantly surprised by how poorly many sales people communicate within their own organizations. Sales people complain, “I’m not getting the information I need to finalize my proposal to the customer,” “My customer isn’t getting the service levels I committed,” “I’m not getting the support I Read More

This morning, I was out for my morning run around the lake. Up ahead, I saw a guy approaching, wearing headphones, smiling, head bouncing with the music. Looked like he was having a great run. Everyone he passed, he shouted, “Hi!” Read More

I got a really interesting email today–actually, I get these emails periodically from various organizations. Today’s was from a very large company that we’ve done business with before (we are a customer of the company). The email was very personal, it started: Dear Dave………. Read More

No, I’ve not decided to convert this blog into a lesson on Anatomy, I actually want to talk about systems. But I don’t mean systems–technology, I mean systems–the way thing work, how things interrelate, specifically in acquiring and retaining customers. Read More

I hear the phrase, “Pay For Performance,” all the time. I think it’s a reasonable concept, that is, the better you perform, the better you get paid. Naturally, we want to pay our top performers the best, who can argue with that? Read More

I’m participating in a discussion with a group of people I deeply respect. It is about managing sales performance, particularly about getting sales people to do things they don’t like to do. You know what those are: Spending time doing reports for management, updating the CRM system, attending o Read More

Sales people are great at “reacting.” The customer puts a hurdle in front of us, we know how to respond. The competitor does something, we know what to do. Our management asks us to do something, we immediately (well OK–almost immediately) jump on it Read More

I know, I know, we use way too many sports metaphors to talk about selling. But we really can learn a lot by watching high performing athletes in some of the most important sports events.This past weekend was packed with some of my favorite sports, the finals at Wimbledon, the World Cup, the start of the Tour de France, and toss in a few nice golf tournaments. Watching them provoked some thoughts Read More

Over the past few days, I’ve been participating in a loss review with one of my clients. It was a painful loss, it was a major opportunity, with a prestigious customer. The winner would lock up the business for the foreseeable future. My client had been pursuing this opportunity for over a year. The sale was for a relatively complex piece of capital equipment. The support teams had done many demonstrations and tests, they had made modifications to the base software to support customer requirements. Through the entire process, they were neck to neck with the competition. In the end, they were even slightly lower priced. Read More