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My friend, Ardath Albee, and I were commiserating the other day. We see so many misguided approaches, whether they are sales people, marketers, individuals. They know the theory–yes, they’re supposed to be customer focused. They know they are supposed to talk about customer needs, problems, goals. They know they should focus on solving customer problems by proposing great solutions. But, to often it’s not like that. Just after the words, “how can I help you,” or “what are your needs,” leave their mouths — before we have a chance to respond — they go on and say, “but let me tell you about our products,” or “let me tell you about me,” or “can you help me?” The focus shifts immediately back to them and what they want Read More

Several days ago I wrote: The Most Used, Useless Metric In Sales. At the same time, I posed a question in LinkedIn asking people their opinions on the worst metric in sales. I was surprised by many of the responses. They included quota and revenue targets in every form–monthly, quarterly, annual. They included pipeline metrics, many variations of activity metrics and lots of others. Some of the metrics were very bad, many were simply bureaucratic reporting-having little to do with assessing sales performance, some represented micromanagement on the part of managers Read More

Customer Centricity is a hot topic these days.  I get on my soapbox on Customer Focus, Customer Experience, How Buying Is Changing, and various aspects o Read More

Metrics are critical to managing sales performance. Yet too often, we put in place metrics that are not only meaningless, but misleading. What's the most used useless metric in sales Read More

Winning deals means you have demonstrated superior and differentiated value to the customer in their terms. Why do we insist on delivering generic value propositions? Read More

We don't have anything to pitch, but we need to meet with our customers. What do we talk to them about? We focus so much on pitching, we have not developed our skills in understanding the customer and their needs. How do we walk into customers with a blank pad of paper and a few questions. Read More

What if we changed the way we looked at Sales Productivity. Rather than focusing on sales related activities, let's look at non-sales related activities. It's likely we'll find tremendous time drains in those areas that can improve sales productivity. Read More

@gerhard20 declares: Ditch the pitch, We are in a conversation economy. The sales pitch is dead. I'd love to believe that, but let's look at some data..... Read More

Every sales manager conducts funnel or pipeline reviews, but few focus on using the review as a coaching opportunity. Read More

Many of our sales and marketing strategies fail because we have the wrong focus. We develop them from the perspective of our companies and needs. If we start with the customer and work back, we can be much more effective--and it's simpler! Read More