When Matt finished the meeting, he was angry. His biggest customer just told him that she had placed a big order with a new supplier.
“You know it’s not you. I like working with you, Matt. How long have we been working together? It’s been a long time,” said Joanne, the EVP Operations at DeepEarth...
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Let’s face it, the cold call is one of the most dreaded parts of the sales profession. And why wouldn’t it be? Essentially, you’re interrupting someone’s day to get something you need out of them — information, a meeting, a new sale, you name it.
But picking up the phone is not only one of the...
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Decades ago, psychotherapist Thom Hartmann proposed two mental models that described how people go about their work. The hunter mindset, based on nomadic societies, suffered from a short attention span but had hyper-focus for short bursts of time.
The farmer, based on agrarian societies, was...
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Sam kept me waiting for 30 minutes. When we finally met, he was anything but pleasant. I should have trusted my gut and walked away. But I didn’t. I’m a pro. I can deal with anyone. Or at least that’s what I was thinking. However, when he demanded a proposal by 9:00 the next morning, I was out of...
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If you travel by car to a city in Europe, you’re likely to find yourself navigating an intricate maze of twisting roads. You could try to find tourist attractions based on your instincts, but you’re likely to get turned around and lose your sense of direction.
Today, there’s a better option: GPS....
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Success stories are effective to use as proof and reinforcement late in the buying cycle once a customer has already formed a complete buying vision that fully recognizes "why change?" and "why you?"
These stories are easy to tell because you’re providing proof to a customer...
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In his new book, Sales Process Excellence, Michael J. Webb advocates iterative, process-oriented, approaches to improving sales performance. In his view, there’s a missing link that hinders most companies from achieving sales process excellence: a lack of performance analytics that let everyone...
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Effective sales representatives actively listen and watch for customer cues that indicate interest or emotion. A “cue” is a behavior, behavioral pattern, or shift in behavior that reveals a reaction or motivating feeling. Cues can be either non-verbal or verbal, and most of your customers will...
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There was a time, long, long ago in a dim and distant past when, if you were in sales, the company you worked for and the product you sold were more important than how you personally sold. You may remember the ‘No one gets fired for buying IBM’ adage. Buying from a market leader was often seen as...
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