John Cousineau

John Cousineau is the founder and CEO of innovative information inc. His firm helps sales organizations increase revenues by using analytics to identify, share, and improve best practices in Bus Dev.

Oct 15, 2014 By John Cousineau

5 Tips for Maximizing the Rest of Dreamforce

Dreamforce is a remarkable opportunity for many things — professional development, networking, discovering new ways to conquer key issues you’re now tasked with addressing. But now that it's halfway over, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed at how to get the most out of time here. Hit... Read More

Careers, Dreamforce, Events, Marketing

Sep 26, 2014 By John Cousineau

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect: 5 Keys to Better Sales Productivity

It often takes several months of onboarding for new sales hires to reach "on-target" performance. It takes time to learn how to sell anything with impact. How long? In his book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell notes that it takes around 10,000 hours of practice over roughly 10... Read More

Featured, Sales

Sep 18, 2014 By John Cousineau

5 Keys to Learning Productive B2B Sales Practices, Fast

Research shows it takes 10,000 hours of practice done over roughly 10 years to achieve the pinnacle of performance: craftsmanship. However, research also shows it can take a lot less than that to learn the basics. Josh Kaufman, author of The First 20 Hours, suggests if you’re smart about how you... Read More

Sales

Jul 31, 2014 By John Cousineau

6 Takeaways for B2B Sales From the Greatest Comeback in Sports History

A recent Harvard Business Review article summarizes lessons businesses can learn from the greatest comeback in sports history: the Oracle team’s unexpected victory over New Zealand in the 2013 America’s Cup. It highlights the value of 'performing with speed' by 'learning at speed',... Read More

Featured, Sales

Jun 18, 2014 By John Cousineau

How to Improve Your Sales By Asking Better Questions

In his book A Beautiful Question, Warren Berger makes the case that questions create the "lightbulb effect" needed to innovate in anything. It’s an artform all of us learned as kids and almost all of us have lost somewhere along the way to growing up. In Berger’s view, there’s a... Read More

Sales

Apr 18, 2014 By John Cousineau

4 Ways Managers Can Better Empower Their Sales Team

It’s more important than ever for business leaders of today to empower their employees. Setting them up for success is all about allowing for collaboration and engagement, and abandoning the “command-and-control” management style of old. This idea is the focus of Dan Pontefract’s title, Flat Army:... Read More

Sales

Mar 28, 2014 By John Cousineau

3 Ways to Jump-Start B2B Sales Productivity

Jon Vander Ark of McKinsey is the co-author of Sales Growth. As a summary of their findings, Vander Ark and his co-authors recently suggested in the Harvard Business Review that CEOs Need to Get Serious About Sales by: Making sales success a cross-functional team sport. Building a... Read More

Sales

Mar 05, 2014 By John Cousineau

7 Leadership Recipes for Improving Sales Productivity

Practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes permanent. The key therefore is to practice right. This is one of several insights offered in Perfect Practice. It’s a cookbook, from 3 former educators, that offers some intriguing insights into how sales execution [as a form of practice] can improve sales... Read More

Sales

Jan 28, 2014 By John Cousineau

5 Things You Can Do to Solve Tough Sales Performance Problems

When poor sales performance persists, and everything you’ve tried hasn’t worked, it’s tempting to sit back and say, "That’s just the way it is." It’s probably the number one reason sales performance problems DO persist. Skepticism. The Power of Positive Deviance is a generalized look at... Read More

Sales