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I was having coffee with a close friend, @francineallaire, this morning.  She's an outstanding sales professional.  As we often do, our conversation drifted Read More

For those of you with a background in Lean, TAKT Time is a familiar concept for manufacturing, but what’s the application to sales and marketing?

TAKT actually comes from the German word, Taktzeit, which refers to the cycle time, beat or rhythm. It’s a powerful concept for Lean manufacturing. Read More

Start a rigorous cross training program--it will allow you to reach even higher levels of sales performance. Read More

I'm constantly amazed by the misrepresentations, lies, and trickery sales people use to reach a customer--either to get a customer to answer the phone or to Read More

As you may read from my earlier posts, the cornerstone of Lean thinking is about value. Every step, every activity is about creating value. Steps and activities that don't create value are waste. Waste detracts from value--it creates cost--for our customers, our companies, ourselves. Read More

Strategic account programs can be very powerful, but make sure they are really strategic in the eyes of the customer. There is nothing wrong with having large customers who give us a lot of money who are not strategic. Read More

There are many people involved in the decision making process, we need to engage many of them, we need to understand how power and influence will be exercised and invest more time (though not exclusively) in those with great power and influence for the specific decision we want made. Read More

The other power of the collaborative dialog is the teaching is now bi-directional. Just was we seek to teach the customer, we are also learning from the customer. This enables us to improve--to take these insights and this learning to other customers, further increasing our value and differentiatin Read More

Watching high performers is different. The biggest difference seems to be focus and purposefulness. High performers first know what they need to be focusing on. Then have an ability to separate the urgent from the critical/important. They focus even further--what are the things that need to be done Read More

More value is not better! More value is confusing and distracting. More value can create complexity from the point of view of the customer---they have to figure out and sort through all the stuff we throw at them. More value wastes customer time and resources in trying to understand exactly what va Read More