WRITTEN ON March 30th, 2012 BY John
The quarter is ending and I’m guessing a bunch of us offered up discounts as a way to get clients to sign by the end of the month so we could hit our target. I get it, I do but we need to be better than that and do what we can to reverse this [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON March 2nd, 2012 BY John
Few things are more frustrating than people who constantly come up with problems but never come up with solutions. You know the type, they’re the ones who are always complaining about everything – change in commission plans, bad territories, bad economy, the customer is an idiot, the competition screwed them, their product’s price is too [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON November 9th, 2011 BY John
As sales professionals with quotas, prospects, clients, meetings, admin work, follow up activities and so on, we rarely get a chance (or take the chance) to stop and think about what we’re doing. If we did we’d realize some of what we’re doing could be done a lot better and some shouldn’t be done at [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON September 20th, 2011 BY John
Have you ever seen the movie Tommy Boy? If not go see it. If it’s been a while – see it again. It’s one of the best sales movies of all time. There’s a scene in Tommy Boy that stands out and highlights what I call “catching your sales groove.” Here’s the scene:
http://www.vimeo.com/13574927
It’s the one [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON August 31st, 2011 BY John
I’m here at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce walking the trade show floor and noticing for the first time (since it’s been a while since I’ve been to a trade show) how ineffective most sales reps are who work the booths. I’m here not only for networking and business development purposes but I’m also evaluating different learning platforms [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON August 5th, 2011 BY John
It’s actually the second best answer a sales rep can hear besides the obvious yes. The worst sin in sales is not for a sales rep to lose a deal, it’s to take a long time to lose a deal. So, the faster you can figure out a solution is not the right fit and [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON July 25th, 2011 BY John
We’re all taught to dig for, find and sell to pain. There’s nothing wrong with this approach other than the fact that sometimes we don’t pick our head up and realize sometimes (a lot of times) people buy for pleasure reasons as well. The main reason most of us are stuck in the world of [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON July 5th, 2011 BY John
These are two of the most meaningless phrases in Sales and yet 99.99% of us do it all day long. We call a client who has agreed to move forward on a proposal by a specific date and instead of directly asking for the order we “touch base” with them to see how everything is [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON June 8th, 2011 BY John
Sales is the best profession in the world for multiple reasons. One of them is that we can (and do) practice it all the time and everywhere we go. The trick is to actively think about practicing it and pay attention. If you have kids you negotiate all the time (“you want to stay up [...]
read moreWRITTEN ON May 17th, 2011 BY John
Yes! As brutal as Blake (Alec Baldwin) was in his Glenngary Glen Ross speech he was right. You should always be closing. The question is how and for what? When most people think about closing they think about asking for the order. This is obvious although you’d be amazed at how often we see even [...]
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