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The words we use betray our thinking and focus.  How we express ourselves shows our biases, our priorities, our prejudices.  So what, what's this mean to Read More

Sales people don't like the routine! We do different things every day. Each situation is different, each call is different. There's huge variability in our jobs --- or so we like to think. But is it really true? Is it really true that we can't plan our days, that there aren't some standard practice Read More

A sales person’s job is to sell–nothing surprising.  More and more, however, it seems that things conspire against us, diverting us from engaging our customers.  There’s some market research that puts the time available for selling at around 42%, but more and more, that figure seems optimistic.  Read More

The more complicated or confusing we make it for our customers to work with us in acquiring our products and in working with us, the more likely they are to go somewhere else--somewhere where it's easier to buy! Read More

In my post, Focus On Your Sweet Spot, I spoke of the importance of developing a rich profile of your ideal customer and focusing viciously on qualifying opportunities within the sweet spot. It's a fundamental to sales success. Too often, we have a poorly defined sweet spot or none at all. Read More

Too often, sales people define the sweet spot as, these customers buy the types of products we sell. At a high level this may be valid, but there may be a whole number of factors that make the sale very difficult, high risk, or unprofitable. They may be someone's good customer (maybe even a competi Read More

Not all revenue is good revenue! Yes, sometimes we choose to book marginal business, but each time that needs to be something that is carefully reviewed. We have to focus on developing good business, getting good revenue. Good revenue is business we can acquire, support, and grow profitably. Good r Read More

But then there is the downtime. Those few minutes waiting to see the customer. All that time traveling to and from the customer, all the spaces between those activities we have on our agendas. Upon reflection, it piles up. There are huge chunks of our day that are downtime, opportunities to do some Read More

We are all busy.  We start our days already with too much on our plates.  Turn on the computer, hundreds on emails come in.  Tweets, texts, phone calls all Read More

Effective challenging, effective teaching, effective insight must be done in a context that is relevant and specific to the customer. Absent that, it's arrogance, puffery, and just today's form of the classic sales person's approach, Buy my product. Read More