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There are lots of great reasons to use humor in your sales pitch. A funny story, joke, quote, or prop can engage your prospect, add welcome lightness to a heavy subject, and increase audience recall. Yup, humor can be a great….when it works. And when it doesn’t? Few things will suck the confidence out of ...

What happens when one of the big accounts we’ve come to count on for sales becomes a variable client that we can no longer count on?

A couple of weeks ago, I happened across an interesting Forbes article that referenced LinkedIn. I happen to be a LinkedIn power user, so I thought I’d add my personal thoughts. The article read, in part: Very few people will ever see your resume, but millions of people can see your LinkedIn profile right now! ...

Opportunity cost is the investment your company must make to achieve a sale, and it has a bearing on every company activity associated with a sales cycle. It is applicable equally on the higher level of entrepreneurship as well as at the level of the sales force—which of course includes sales reps and sales management. ...

Exceptional salespeople recognize that they have dependencies and that their success depends on the performance of others in the delivery chain, particularly customer service. But in my experience engaging the frontline service team as a regular source of customer and market information doesn’t occur often enough and is not seen as a particularly high sales ...

In recent years, I’ve heard many variations on this theme: “I won’t tolerate this anymore! I’m fed up!” People simply don’t want to be sold to. We’ve all had enough of unwanted phone calls, both at home and at work. We’re tired of slogging through unsolicited emails. We really wish we’d see the end of ...

Or, it’s not what you sell, but how you sell. When you call someone and don’t receive a return call, what thoughts go through your head? When you send an email to a prospect and receive no response, how do you feel? In conversation with sellers, they often tell me that their biggest source of ...

“You shut your mouth when you’re talking to me!” Some readers might recall the source of this infamous confusion. It came from the movie Wedding Crashers. In sales, we mimic this noxious craziness every day without batting an eye. We hire salespeople and drop a heavy quota on their shoulders. We pay them a base ...