Recent News

Hosting your executives on sales calls can cause great results or they can just be a lot of work and consternation. They can allow your executives to see and hear the real challenges your face or you can put on a pretty show that draws false conclusions. Executives can make things better or worse by the tone they set. Are executives there to help, as they should, or are they there just to highlight areas where the field needs to work even harder? Which situation do you have?...

As i've said in earlier writings, it's important to prepare for all kinds of chance customer exchanges. It starts with being clear on the most important value propositions you have to deliver to your customers. Building the 30-Second Exchange, as I did before meeting with Michael Dell, forces you to become very crisp on your most important value propositions. From there you can build 3-Minute and 30-Minute Exchanges that prepare you for any impromptu interaction with prospective or existing customers....

Golf is a popular way that sales people, and business people in general, use to develop customer and partner relationships. But it isn't the only way to develop long standing relationships and it can have negative results. Here's a short, hopefully fun read on how golf worked, or didn't work, for me in doing business....

In B2B selling you will likely have an opportunity to compete for business with a customer who didn't choose you the first time. Knowig that, it's important to know that you aren't the only one who learns from your failures. Customers also learn when you fail and what they see can be the difference between getting that next opportunity or not. See how to ensure you get that next opportunity....

Product people sometimes ignore feedback claiming that all sales people will always side with the customer and are not to be trusted. It's called going native. That is a certain way of missing valuable information, alienating customers and, of course, losing business. As Randy Jackson, of American Idol, would say, 'sales people are in it to win it' just like product people. Find out why this assumption is bad....

Having good customer relationships doesn't equate to siding with them on every issue. The customer needs sales people to be objective with the right balance between customer advocacy and company representation so there are no surprises when it comes time to deploy what is purchased. Find out why going native is bad....

Having a clearly strategic and unique offering is a luxury most sales people never get to enjoy in their careers. Even so, many of these same sales people have incredibly successful careers and many would say they not only got better, but also had more fun, when having to sell as an underdog. Exercising their creativity to redefine an offering to get a win, is one of the most fun things a sales person can do....