Every day, many thousands of salespeople send emails to their prospective clients. Their sales leaders allow their teams to send these emails, and what is worse, many count those emails as a prospecting activity. It is counted even if the message found its way to the ...
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 ...
When it comes to improving your sales team’s performance any training has to be better than no training, right? Wrong. If ...
Activity gets a bad rap. Just suggesting that more activity might be necessary to improve results makes sales leaders and ...
How would your leadership team react if they learned that one simple change could increase your company’s annual revenue ...
Large companies with a purchasing function and professional buyers treat the buying process as something transactional. In ...
We rarely analyze how performance in sales leadership intersects with individual salespeople’s results. Instead, it's ...
“Be aggressive!” “Be patient!” “Don’t be pushy!” “Lead your client!” This is just a smattering of the sales advice many ...
Human beings program algorithms, then algorithms return the favor—especially on social apps. Both the programmers and their ...
Today is the future you thought about in the past. It probably arrived sooner than you expected—that’s the nature of ...
What do increased opportunities, increased salesperson retention, and increased team confidence have in common? They’re all ...
How is it that professional salespeople—people who spend a good amount of their time helping clients change—refuse to change ...
To understand how sales has changed, you must recognize the limitation of the "legacy solution" approach we've practiced for ...
To improve your sales results, you may have heard, stop trying to sell your drill—instead, sell the hole your drill creates.
Some of the older approaches to sales are based on a fear of the prospective client. Fear is a crippling emotion in sales, ...
The dramatic changes in our 21st-century environment have touched every part of our lives, including our companies and our ...
The phone is a dying sales tool. Not really, but if you read one of the many think pieces that have come out on the subject ...
I spend a lot of time writing about sales, but it's important to remember that your mindset and well-being are the most ...
Occasionally, some smart entrepreneur comes up with a product or service so much better than anything else in their category ...
What is the best sales approach for B2B sales? Is it "Solutions Selling" or perhaps "Spin Selling?" Sandler? Challenger? Is ...
When a client removes you as a partner and replaces you with a competitor, it’s because they believe you are not providing ...
The legacy approach most salespeople still use focuses on asking prospective clients about their problems. Some believe each ...
We sometimes reduce a strategy to a brief description, without providing a deep enough explanation to communicate how and ...
The average American company loses 23-30% of its customer base each year, which means you need to be constantly finding new ...
Our culture worships efficiency as the high mark of civilization. We bemoan any Amazon order that doesn’t hit our porch ...
You are a modern leader, one smart enough to engage your team, improving their plan by allowing others to contribute to ...
A long time ago, I formulated a rule for prospecting—the Trading Value Rule—that extends far beyond acquiring a meeting with ...
In the article linked below, Brent Adamson, VP of Gartner, offers you a view into the changing world of sales and marketing ...
In 2016, I published a book titled The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need. In the chapter on Accountability, I wrote that you ...
Cold calling gets a bad rap these days. You may have seen the statistic that most cold calling professionals report a 2% ...
Three generations of sales approaches are being used today. The oldest of the three is over fifty years old and designed to ...
Ah yes, the scripted sales call from an unknown number. The discomfort is palpable: you can hear the salesperson’s lack of ...
When there is no difference in the client's experience from one salesperson to the next, the client has little to prefer one ...
A salesperson who doesn’t sell is no salesperson at all—even if they have a nice eggshell-creme business card with a title ...
One reason that sales organizations struggle to generate revenue or growth is because they have a low-resolution view of ...
You need to reach your dream client to schedule a meeting and create a new opportunity. You email on Monday morning, waiting ...
As the world continues to change, we know that we must change with it. But it’s often difficult to recognize when it is time ...
If your sales reps had an expertly crafted, clear-cut sales process, how much would their sales performance improve?
Seven Strategies to Energize Your Productivity Work in ninety-minute blocks. Ninety minutes is enough time to complete many ...
Sooner or later, you will have to address difficult issues or situations with your clients—even the genuinely nice, mature, ...
Here is my list of eleven life categories to improve this year: Health and Physical Wellness Psychological Health and Stress ...
Jump to a section: What Makes Prospecting the Most Important Aspect of Sales? Sales Prospecting: Everything Counts, but Not ...
Almost everyone you will ever meet will want some combination of more money, better health, better relationships, and ...
There are several reasons that prospecting receives outsized attention, especially on LinkedIn and other social media sites.
Jump to a section: What the Proverb "A Fish Rots from the Head Down" Can Teach Sales Leaders If You Are a Sales Leader, You ...
Here's my list of the best B2B sales books:
"Moving fast isn't the same as getting somewhere." – Robert Anthony When my first real band fell apart I put together a new ...
I don't know who originally said, "Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die." As it turns out, of course ...
I knew the salesperson would not have much to say when he started our call with, "how's it going," a dead giveaway that the ...
The proliferation of technologies that provide for asynchronous communication, like email or automated sequences, has come ...
It's not easy to reach your goals, hit your targets, and make your quota. Many B2B sales organizations and salespeople ...
Of all the ways to lose a deal, the most reliable is to project a self-orientation. When your client feels that your ...
There are four metrics we commonly track in sales to measure progress toward our goals: number of opportunities, average ...
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for ...
Welcome to the first newsletter of 2022. If you are a sales leader, a sales manager, a salesperson, or in some other role ...
Can you put a dollar value on switching from an ineffective (or even absent) sales process to an effective one? According to ...
At the beginning of a new year, many people make resolutions and set new goals for themselves. Everyone starts with good ...
For many years, I have borrowed a practice from Chris Brogan: theming each year by using three words to provide clarity and ...
The 10 Most Common Sales Mistakes Outdated Sales Approaches: There is nothing more harmful to your sales results than ...
One reason sales organizations fail to reach their goals is because they lack opportunities. Sure, their pipeline meetings ...
Your experience on earth is largely about how you frame things that occur around you. How you choose to interpret and ...
It's not uncommon to sacrifice precise accuracy when you communicate: we sometimes use similar but distinct words as if they ...
There are only two reasons a salesperson or sales force might have poor sales results. Improving these results requires that ...
There's no earthly way of knowing Which direction they are going! There's no knowing where they're rowing, Or which way the ...
Learning Like Napoleon When Napoleon was given command of the Italian Army, he was 26 years old. He requested every book on ...
Let me kick you a scenario: Your sales team is struggling. Your average close rate is down, morale is low, and you're out of ...
Every great sales force is built on a positive culture of accountability. Many common sales problems, such as too few ...
Your prospective client agreeing to a meeting is a gift, one you should never take for granted. Agreeing to a meeting means ...
There are things we value enough to find them precious (like that one ring), making them dear to us, if only in some ...
As we wrap up a second pandemic year and begin a third one, it's worth a moment or two to reflect on the world in which we ...
I hope that 2021 was your best year ever, despite the pandemic and all the challenges that came with it. It's important to ...
We live in a Universe that seems to impose a law of cause and effect: results, both negative and positive, are always ...
This is my last Sunday Newsletter of 2021.
The subject line of the email asked a grammatically dubious question: "Should I speak to, Jim?" The ploy is designed to get ...
Traditionally, the legacy model’s value proposition was found in the company's products, services, or "solution" (a word I ...
“If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.” –General Eric Shinseki
Only 2% of cold calls are successful. That's a bleak figure, even for the most optimistic of sales professionals. When it ...
One my favorite thinkers and writers is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I often re-read his books, always learning something new or ...
One holdover from the linear sales process proposed by the legacy approaches to sales is a tendency to put our own agenda ...
There is a certain type of training that does nothing to improve a sales organization's results. We call it “check box” ...
Here in Columbus, you are required to support the Ohio State Buckeyes football team, for the same reason being born in Rome ...
Everything good that ever happens is the result of meeting a stranger. Your significant other was once a stranger, as was ...
We've all been on the receiving end of a bad sales call. Stilted language, too-pushy pacing, or even simply a product or ...
Selling isn't easy. It comes with a set of challenges that you must address effectively to reach your goals. What follows ...
Why do we believe problems and pain drive clients to change? One reason is that we don't recognize how long decision-makers ...
The most important goal that sales organization, sales managers, and salespeople should pursue is effectiveness: the degree ...
No matter what your sales leader or sales manager thinks of your performance, one person’s opinion trumps anything they say. ...
You might believe it impossible to miss your 2022 sales goals and targets before the year has even started, but it’s ...
Some of the books that line my shelves are a mystery—I have no idea where or when I acquired them, or perhaps how they found ...
Finding decent sales training is easy. But finding the best sales training is challenging… unless you know exactly what ...
If you work in sales long enough, at some point you'll encounter a challenge so wide-ranging that you’ll think you should ...
The need for two (or maybe three) pipelines is not well-recognized by either sales leaders or salespeople, especially those ...
Imagine you are struggling to produce some result in your life or your business. You recognize that you need help from ...
There is a fundamental, though uncomfortable, truth about success in sales: selling is not something you do to someone; it's ...
There is a perennial, and mostly erroneous, conversation about the alignment of sales and marketing. The two functions may ...
The Universe can be difficult to navigate: as Paul Simon put it, “the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ ...
When done right, a sales strategy is the driving force that keeps your sales team on track for success.
One of the more difficult things for sales managers to do well is forecasting their quarterly revenue, an exercise only ...
The concept of Level 4 value creation helps salespeople recognize what prospects and clients need from them, even if they ...
Even the best salespeople can fall into the trap of overcomplicating the process of finding a qualified lead for your sales ...
The salesperson had said all that was necessary, but because he was nervous, he continued to keep talking. He was trying to ...
Let’s try an experiment: stop reading, open your Instagram feed, and write down the topics of the first ten sponsored posts. ...
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