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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

A few days ago, I started a discussion with “What Are The 3 Characteristics That Set Great Sales People Apart?” followed by “How Important Are ‘Techniques’ To Sales?” I hadn’t meant to turn this into a series (or saga), but the discussion has been very interesting. For me, it has been a bit of a journey of discovery. I’ve always had an aversion to what I call “techniques” — those 68 closing techniques, the persuasion technique and so forth. Read More

Geoffrey James wrote an interesting article at BNET, Sales Goals vs. Sales Process: Which Is Most Important? Frankly, the question confuses me, it assumes that sales goals and sales process are mutually exclusive. Geoffrey seems conflicted, as well. Later, using the example of an Olympic athlete, he states, “For the Olympic athlete, the process leads naturally and progressively towards the goal. Read More

The other day, I wrote a piece, What Are The 3 Characteristics That Set Great Sales People Apart? It stimulated quite a reaction as people started suggesting their ideas. I was surprised by the focus of a number of people on the “right techniques.” These comments started to make me wonder about my own belief system and biases Read More

Last Friday, I had the privilege of being interviewed by an executive on critical issues in buying and selling. It was a great conversation, but one of his questions stuck in my mind. He asked me, “What are the 3 characteristics that set great sales people apart from others? Read More

It seems to be human nature to take shortcuts. We want results immediately, we don’t want to invest the effort normally required to achieve a goal. We somehow think that we are the exceptions to the rule–while others have to make an effort, somehow we are different and can avoid all the work and effort to achieve the result. In truth, sometimes shortcuts work. They probably work often enough, that we continue to pursue them Read More