What is the most challenging sale you have ever made? What made it so hard? What lessons did you learn from the experience? As a lifelong enterprise sales professional (25+ years and counting), I’d submit that the hardest sale is always the first sale. Landing your first paying customer is an incredibly daunting challenge for…
Sales Enablement is a really hot topic these days. A Google search on “sales enablement” yields 1,950,000 results. A LinkedIn search on the same phrase shows that 230,595 LinkedIn profiles have “sales enablement” as a skill, along with 64 different Groups that claim to have “sales enablement” context and 1,296 Open Jobs that are “sales…
“Steve, you have to compete every day of your life and never give up!” Those were frequent words of advice from my Grandfather. He was born in 1900 and emigrated from Canada to Haverhill, Massachusetts when he was a very young child. His parents didn’t speak English. They only spoke French, so he had to learn English at school.…
Are you sick and tired of the customer survey travesty? These days it seems whether you take your car into the dealership for a servicing, eat out at a restaurant or have internet cable service fixed at your house, there is an associated customer survey that follows. The problem is that the customer survey…
Most VPs of Sales tend to worry about things like increasing their average deal size, improving their win rates, and ramping up new sales team members as fast as possible to “full sales productivity”. They’re concerned with other things like the cost of the sale, the amount of sales opportunities that end up in no decision…
What does the future B2B sales rep look like? I was musing on this very subject a few weeks back with a long time colleague. We started to riff on this and our creative juices started to flow. Plus we were both a bit punchy as it was late Friday afternoon and it had been…
When did quality die? It seems like everyone is always in such a rush to get things done faster these days. This insatiable need for speed and faster time to market pressures have come directly at the expense of quality. I hate to sound like an anachronistic, old dinosaur…but when I started in the business…
First, let me qualify that this isn’t a politically inspired blog post. Instead it is a genuine observation that I’ve experienced in watching the Presidential candidates and debates. Most notably, the surging grass roots popularity of one Bernie Sanders. Who would’ve thunk it? Most political pundits suggest that over the long haul, the Hillary Clinton…
You are a sales rep and you’ve just been notified by your prospect that your product/your company has been “verbally selected” as the solution they want to move forward with. As a long time VP of Sales, I can assure you that one of my least favorite terms in sales is “verbally selected”. Why? Because…
As 2015 comes to a close, I am blessed and humbled to think that the company that I founded, True Sales Results, will be celebrating ten years in business next year. When I started the company, my business plan was drop dead simple. I came up with a short, focused list of consulting services that I could…