As I gaze into my 2019 B2B Sales crystal ball, what do I see? Well, for enlightened B2B technology sales leaders I see a tremendous opportunity to improve their selling effectiveness and outperform their competitors. You are probably asking yourself but how, pray tell, is this possible in 2019 when it is harder than ever…
The best of the best companies who do sales enablement exceptionally well don’t like to talk about it. They actually consider their sales enablement mastery to be a competitive advantage. They use their sales enablement expertise as part of their recruiting process to attract and hire the most talented sales people out there. Top performing…
Why Do We Keep Accepting Failure in B2B Technology Sales? The statistics are sobering and can actually be downright depressing. Well regarded industry analysts keep sharing their research findings on the current state of B2B technology sales…and we’re failing. Badly. According to CSO Insights 2017 World Class Sales Practices Report, only 53% of sales people…
I’m often asked how do you build an effective sales playbook. All too often, my company is brought in after the client has spent considerable time and dollars on a failed sales playbook project. Sometimes the client tries to do it themselves. Other times they engage an outside consulting firm to build a sales playbook…
Words matter. And if you are a sales professional, then they matter a lot. In fact, one word can make the difference between winning a new customer and losing a new customer. Great sales reps spend a lot of time thinking about the words that they will use with their customers. Mediocre sales reps don’t…
My Worst Day in Sales I remember it vividly, as if it were just yesterday. It was my worst day in sales. I had been selling software for 5-6 years at that point in my career. Still had a ton to learn and lots of room to grow as a sales professional. But I was…
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…
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…
Why Are You Accepting Sales Failure? Think of the ancient Greek mythological figure of Sisyphus applied to sales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus) I was chatting about the state of enterprise sales with a long time enterprise sales colleague of mine last week. We’re both grizzled enterprise sales veterans with 25+ years experience, complete with the requisite battle scars…
The most powerful word in sales is “no”. I was reminded of this once again over the past several weeks in various business negotiations. Let’s start with the fact that the customer is not always right. In fact, sometimes the customer can be horribly wrong and ask for things that are not in their best interest.…