I am not a researcher. What I know about sales comes from my experience selling. At age 13, I delivered newspapers and got my start knocking on doors and asking people for money. I was 15 when I took my first job making cold calls. Then, I joined my family's business when I ...
Salespeople typically have a list of factors that they believe influence their success in sales. For example, many ...
You never hear the head of the accounting department ask about how to motivate their accounts payable clerks to pay the ...
Senior sales leaders often complain that sales training doesn't work. There are several reasons why they might be right, but ...
The Oxford English Dictionary offers two definitions for productivity. The first is "the state or quality of being ...
To understand how to talk about your features and benefits, you must start by identifying the level of value the stakeholder ...
Salespeople are a superstitious bunch. There are those who believe Monday isn't a good day to make cold calls, and there are ...
It is important for sales leaders to understand that, when pursuing a deal, the contest isn't between their company and ...
You don't hear a lot about social selling anymore. Its promise was that every salesperson would reach their goals by simply ...
When distinguishing sales leaders from sales managers, titles do not tell the whole story. It is possible that a person with ...
You've finished your discovery process and collaborated with your contacts on what they need. You've also done your best to ...
A long time ago, I noticed that the contacts I called on were not always interested in the meeting they had accepted. The ...
The answer to the question, "Can you teach me how to sell?" is “Yes, I can teach you how to sell.” But the answer is also, ...
In personal or professional development, you can’t cheat. To improve yourself or your teams, you must do the work. The ...
Sales leaders need to know their team has enough of the right opportunities to reach their goals. They also need visibility ...
Selling is a craft. It's a performance. It's also a bit of a mystery. Why is it that two salespeople who work for the same ...
A salesperson walks into a prospective client's office alone. They engage in a conversation with a contact or several ...
Sales Leaders and Sales Managers invest in many things they believe will improve their results. Many, if not most, of these ...
The idea behind needs-based selling is knowing what your client needs. Once you understand the client's needs, you position ...
In the sales world of the past, you would have made a single cold call to a prospective client. Most of the time, you failed ...
A cold call is any call you make to a prospective client who isn’t expecting to hear from you. Some percentage of ...
This post is an adaptation from Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue. You can preorder ...
For five years, I interviewed people. Some days, I interviewed as many as 40 people. These were short interviews for people ...
Many are enamored by sales science. They believe that applying science to selling can improve their results. They look to ...
In the past, the salesperson would call their prospective client and ask for a meeting. The value proposition for the ...
Like many salespeople, you may have been taught to believe that your solution is the value. It is true that your product or ...
One reason clients may distrust salespeople is that they believe salespeople are hiding some inconvenient truth. Prospective ...
This post is an adaptation of a chapter of Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue.
"I have my own sales style." Whenever you hear these words, you can translate it to mean, “I’m winging it." Fortunately for ...
The best performers in any endeavor are dedicated to the fundamentals of their work. As B2B sales grows more complicated and ...
Recently, someone on LinkedIn encouraged me to "keep disrupting the industry." To be clear, I am not a disruptor. There are ...
Different types of sales require different approaches. A salesperson who sells to the government (B2G) is going to need to ...
In the book The Challenger Sale, the relationship salesperson scored poorly. What most readers didn't realize was that the ...
Selling effectively in the 21st Century requires asking clients a new set of discovery questions. These new questions ...
There are three generations of sales approaches being used today. The first is the legacy approach, which is over 50 years ...
Your path to revenue growth begins with your ability to fill your pipeline. Without a full pipeline, growth isn't likely. ...
This question is often posed: Who are the best salespeople? The answer is salespeople who are One-Up. If you want to improve ...
You and I are making cold calls to schedule meetings with our prospective clients. We both have the information for the ...
Only the rarest of sales organizations use a model with soft skills, let alone work to develop them. As a professional, you ...
My take on objections is that most of the time, they mask a client’s real concerns. Because the client is uncertain, they ...
At a company event, two engineers were elated to share that two of their dream clients had downloaded a lead-generation ...
Do you have login fatigue? I know I do.
How confident are you that your sales team can meet your KPIs this quarter?
It would be more difficult for me to share my version of a modern sales approach if the Challenger approach didn’t exist. ...
One of the ways we make trouble for ourselves and others is to categorize and rank things. Our strong tendency to rank, ...
Occasionally, someone asks me about transactional selling strategies. Most of the time, they are suggesting that I have not ...
The root cause of nearly all the price objections is not creating enough value in the sales conversation, while also failing ...
In the past, many people believed the sales process would provide each salesperson with the ability to win the deals they ...
In B2B sales, our messaging has changed, even if most sales organizations haven't made any significant adjustments. Those ...
Whether you call it a funnel, a pipeline, or deals in stages, it's crucial for sales leaders and sales managers to know that ...
Success in sales results from a relatively small number of skills. These skills make up the fundamentals of B2B sales. By ...
The most important thing you need to know about using LinkedIn for prospecting is what not to do. The social platforms ...
Your prospective clients don't want to make a bad buying decision. The more important it is to get the decision right, the ...
The sales process is the stages you go through to create and win new opportunities. What follows here is Sales Process 101, ...
There are certain B2B sales conversations that are important to both the salesperson and their prospective clients. One of ...
If you want to create and win more opportunities, value-based conversations will do more than anything to differentiate you ...
There is a time to work on improving your sales approach, and then there is a time to get back to basics. At heart, I am ...
If you want to increase your sales volume, you will need to pursue one or more of these eight strategies.
If you want to create and win new opportunities, you must ensure you practice some form of a value-based selling approach. ...
There was a time when the most important training a salesperson would receive was concerned with closing. During that ...
The best way to answer the question "What is B2B sales?" is to compare it to other types of sales. The term "B2B sales" ...
The role of the B2B salesperson has never been particularly easy, but as the world, and business, become more complex, so ...
Professional B2B sales is more like mixed martial arts than boxing. In boxing, there are competitors who don't have any ...
Ask any sales leader who has paid for sales training whether it works, and you will find a large percentage will suggest ...
In another time, onboarding a new salesperson would not have been difficult. In fact, many new salespeople did not go ...
What you are about to read may sound like heresy at first. But if you open your mind, you may see something that will allow ...
In October 1992, I had a grand mal seizure while walking up the steps of my Brentwood, California, apartment. It took some ...
According to the legacy sales approaches, you are supposed to identify your client's problem and their pain. Once you have ...
I am tempted to tell a long story about a comment on LinkedIn asking this question, but I am afraid I won't create enough ...
Many salespeople underestimate the importance of how they present themselves when they walk into their prospective client's ...
There are a lot of lists of attributes required of a great leader; most include things like vision, communication, and a ...
If your most senior sales manager left unexpectedly, how long would it take your team to fill the role? In the face of the ...
At some point in your life, someone will tell you that you need SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, ...
What does resilience mean to you? A few concepts probably come to mind when you hear the word—concepts like toughness, the ...
One of the hangovers from the legacy sales approaches is that the salesperson undervalues the sales conversation for what it ...
We’ve all heard the saying that the best way to learn is by doing. I respectfully disagree.
In any conversation between a salesperson and their client, the salesperson is either One-Up or One-Down. The term One-Up ...
When it comes to change, some clients are more difficult to help than others. This post is not about clients that are ...
Having certain client conversations in a particular sequence can improve your ability to help clients change. It can be ...
Salespeople need stories to sell. Much of the time, salespeople use stories about their client's problems and how their ...
The ability to be One-Up requires you to have more knowledge and experience than your clients. It doesn't suggest that you ...
The data shows that salespeople are not doing well. A search for something like “quota attainment” reveals that a large part ...
There are a lot of tough jobs in business, frontline sales manager is one of them. Those who succeed tend to have the right ...
When a client has done something in a certain way over a long time, the fact that it has always worked can cause them to ...
Leading isn't easy, and leading sales is one of the more difficult roles in business. Unlike some other leadership roles, ...
One of the more difficult initiatives a sales leader can attempt is changing their sales approach. Every so often, the ...
There is a general consensus that you win or lose a deal in the discovery phase of the sales conversation, even if it takes ...
Let's look directly at an inconvenient truth most are unwilling to recognize or acknowledge: Your company, as good as it is, ...
One of the best ways to be productive is to avoid wasting time. The more time you waste, the less time you have for what is ...
The "cult of efficiency" believes deeply that the most important initiative is to generate more activity. More still, they ...
Frequent readers know that the primary focus of my work is sales effectiveness and sales leadership. My work is focused on ...
The feedback on Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative has been ...
A long time ago, sales leaders sought a solution for their uneven results. Some members of their teams were able to win ...
My version of the modern sales approach isn't very much like that described in The Challenger Sale, with the exception of ...
When you ask a prospective client for a meeting, you are asking them to provide you with their single, non-renewable ...
A recent story on LinkedIn was about a senior leader who was unhappy with the results of a highly compensated salesperson. ...
One either believes in leadership or they do not. You might doubt that there are people who don't believe in leadership but, ...
Every salesperson can be sorted into one of two primary categories. The first category is a salesperson who needs something ...
One way to describe our current environment is AC/DC, an acronym for the Accelerating, Constant, Disruptive Change we have ...
Oxford defines a crutch as a prop, a support. While there is nothing wrong with needing a little support, the crutches ...
Every day, many thousands of salespeople send emails to their prospective clients. Their sales leaders allow their teams to ...
The primary challenge in sales today is that the legacy approaches don't position the salesperson appropriately in the first ...
The concept of being One-Up means you believe your client is One-Down as it pertains to decision-making and the better ...
I'm arguing with Jonathan Graham and Michael Price from the Inward Book Club. They have been kind enough to review a number ...
A sales manager needs to be seen and heard if they are going to lead their sales force. One of the downsides of our ...
There must be something in the water that is causing salespeople to suggest in writing their new desire to avoid persuading ...
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) reached 8.6%, the highest inflation recorded in the last four decades. Energy prices are up ...
Inside the sales conversation, there are four levels of value: The first level of value is the conversation is sharing ...
What causes a prospective client to choose to buy from one salesperson instead of another? What creates the preference to ...
There are a number of sales beliefs that are so well known they are accepted as a matter of faith. Expressing a different ...
The concept of being One-Up causes some to have a negative reaction, as it breaks the old paradigm of the legacy approach to ...
You know cold calling can work… maybe you just haven’t seen it for yourself just yet. And that’s not for lack of trying.
Everything good that happens to a salesperson starts by meeting a stranger and engaging in a number of conversations. When ...
Spend any amount of time on LinkedIn or some other social channel, and you will find all kinds of sales-related content, ...
A coin holds a specific amount of value. The benefit of a coin is that you can give it to another party, allowing them to ...
A decision maker is defined by their title. A person who is charged with making a decision, especially one with the ...
Are your sales leaders armed with all the tools they need to succeed in the role?
A post on LinkedIn suggested that it is important to have a physical presence—specifically, a face-to-face meeting—with your ...
Selling isn't easy, even when you have experience. Eventually, those who treat selling as their craft instead of their job ...
No matter how you slice it, sales prospecting is challenging. You may have heard the troubling stats about sales prospecting ...
The fastest way to ruin a business is to grow revenue without also growing profit. No matter how much net new revenue you ...
The shift from being an individual contributor to leading a sales force isn't an easy transition. The character traits are ...
Is sales an art or a science? In other words, is it more important for salespeople to be creative and innovative, or that ...
The "why us" approach salespeople have used for more than 100 years was based on the idea that the salesperson lacked ...
Some number of years ago, as social media took hold, many believed they had found a replacement for the cold call. A small ...
Every company wants its sales force to be successful, creating and winning new opportunities, and generating net new ...
Imagine you are a manager (who isn’t in sales) and the results you are responsible for producing have become increasingly ...
I am grateful that the concept of being One-Up has resonated with salespeople and sales leaders. It’s a position that allows ...
We are happy with our current provider. Can you send me some information? Can you try me again next quarter? Your price is ...
I once had a client who was an incredibly difficult person. Each day, I visited her company to ensure we were meeting her ...
Every One-Down salesperson has a tell, something that reveals their low level of status and knowledge. A decision maker or a ...
The One-Down salesperson uses an approach that causes their prospective client to recognize they aren't someone with the ...
The major difference between One-Up salespeople and those presently One-Down is that the One-Up person creates a tremendous ...
While the One-Up approach to sales is more than just a state of mind, like all effective approaches, it starts with a ...
Some salespeople argue that there is no way to know what problems, challenges, or obstacles a client might have before ...
Most of the time, you are unaware of the voice in your head, the one endlessly chattering away. But occasionally, if you ...
One of the complaints you will hear from your clients and customers is that your price is higher than your competition's. A ...
Happy Birthday to your sales opportunity on its fifth birthday. It's been amazing to watch you share a picture of your ...
Werner Erhard would describe "the guy in the diner" as someone who has an opinion on everything without ever experiencing ...
You don't want to have a bad relationship with procurement or purchasing, but you don't want them to love you either. The ...
There are two methods of starting a sales conversation. The first way to start the conversation occurs when a salesperson ...
Without a sales culture, you will experience results that are less than they should be, including the net new revenue that ...
Most of our approaches to sales can be compared to what LTG McMaster (U.S. Army Retired) describes as strategic narcissism: ...
Customer expectations change. Technology changes. Sales changes. Yet, cold calling remains. Should it, or is it finally time ...
Nobody likes rejection. If there’s one statement I can make that I think is universal to the human experience, it’s this ...
How effective is video training? Pretty darn effective, it turns out. Learners remember an average of only 10% of the ...
Much of what you read here comes from my experience selling and leading a sales force in a highly commoditized industry. In ...
CNBC Headline: The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point, the most ...
The sales leader was stunned by the idea that she was allowed to make her sales team prospect. This was news to her, good ...
Sales prospecting is essential, but it can be challenging. Surveyed sales professionals even ranked prospecting as more ...
Your internal will become your external. What you believe will manifest in your life, or as Earl Nightingale put it, "We ...
Does cold calling apply in the modern B2B sales development space? Considering that more than half of C-level execs want ...
I was thirteen years old and just starting high school when a friend asked me if I wanted to go to work washing dishes at a ...
Recently someone responded to a LinkedIn post suggesting the most important thing for the salesperson to know is their ...
It isn't easy to be a sales leader or a sales manager. There is an unrelenting need to create new opportunities, win new ...
Three traits seem to speed up success. You might believe these three traits are character traits that cannot be developed, ...
There is a lot of talk about differentiation in sales, and almost every sales organization pursues sales in the same way, ...
There may be nothing worse than churn when it comes to net new revenue growth. The more clients you churn, the more you find ...
Almost three-quarters of Americans consider themselves lifelong learners. Still, in most sales teams, the words “training ...
Stop me if you’ve heard these: “Sales training doesn’t work.” “I’m a natural at sales, I don’t need training.” “Sales ...
What if your team’s cold call close rate could be 10% or higher? With the right B2B cold calling tips and tricks, that ...
Are cold calls your least favorite part of the job? They don’t have to be. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when ...
If the intention of your discovery questions is to elicit a problem so you can sell your "solution," you are not really ...
What’s the difference between saying “we provide” and saying “you can get”? On a cold call, the difference is about a 22% ...
The main outcome of discovery for most salespeople is to identify the client's problem and its impact. The reason the ...
Is your close rate where you want it to be? If not, the problem may be in your phone game. In fact, 86% of prospects aren’t ...
Today we release my fourth book, Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly ...
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022, my fourth book, Elite Sales Strategies: A guide to being One Up, Creating Value, and Becoming ...
No one wants to live in the Red Ocean, but if you believe the Blue Ocean is somehow better, look at the short time Netflix ...
Disclosure: Not everything in sales or buying has changed. There are plenty of fundamentals still effective and useful. The ...
As a sales professional, you’re used to selling to customers, but selling to stakeholders in your own organization is a ...
Ask any salesperson if they would like to be their client's trusted advisor and you will find few rejecting the opportunity ...
The four books I have written and published are really one big book, based on one big idea. That idea is that the craft of ...
Draw a perfect circle, $3,000 is on the line. Now would you rather attempt that freehand, or with a template? Easy answer, ...
There is nothing wrong with selling whatever it is you sell at a lower price than your competitors if that is the value you ...
The idea that salespeople solve problems is true. But this is mostly only true when solving the problem means selling their ...
We sometimes think too little about the challenges our clients experience when they engage with us. While we are trying to ...
Sales training is useless. At least that’s a common myth we’ve heard from salespeople who have experienced outdated and ...
Recently, I switched my project and task manager from Todoist (a great tool, and one I have enjoyed using over a number of ...
A football team would never hike the ball without calling a play: Your sales team should operate in the same way. For your ...
There is a difference between the value created in the sales conversation and the value of your product or service, one or ...
To create a preference to buy what you sell, you must create some kind of meaningful differentiation. But most salespeople ...
After posting an article on LinkedIn, a reader commented to ask me about a line in the article that reads: “If the only ...
How on Earth is it possible that you don't already know what problems your clients have? How could you not already know what ...
There are some questions that salespeople just don’t like to ask their clients—usually out of fear that they’ll come across ...
Imagine a company is exploring some significant change. They've looked at a number of potential partners online, all of whom ...
There are a lot of bad ideas out there about sales and selling. Inevitably, some of them get treated as if they were ...
After I started providing an executive briefing during quarterly business reviews with my contacts, executive leaders ...
“A man is only as good as his tools.” -Emmert Wolf When I moved to Los Angeles to play music, I showed up with two floor ...
A recent article asked the question: "How much would you pay for a discovery meeting with your dream client?" What makes ...
Over the last couple of months, some significant amount of what I have written and published was intended to allow you to ...
There is a "tell" that provides you with evidence your deal isn't likely to close and should not find its way into your ...
The evolution of the complex B2B sale has all but eliminated "transactional" approaches and is now moving past ...
Each year, publishers release somewhere in the ballpark of 11 thousand new business-related books. The good news is that ...
I learned to sell in an industry that grew more commoditized with every passing year. My first experience was a startup, and ...
There are not too many sales experiences worse than being qualified over the telephone. Having someone waste your time ...
Let’s start with a riddle: Why did the team of world-class all-stars lose the big game?
There are a number of topics you might share with your contacts in the sales conversation they find to be immensely valuable ...
Let's assume anything you sell might fall into one of four categories. The first category is "Acceptable." The second ...
My six email boxes fill up every week, the result of a technology with no barrier to prevent anyone and everyone from ...
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