In business it’s a constantly repeated mantra: “Think OUTSIDE the BOX.” There is one fact that many don’t seem to grasp: the road to original ideas is not direct. Finding a location such as “outside the box” cannot be accomplished with a GPS. It’s off the grid–much like traveling a dirt road, encountering and taking ... Read Post

At Flannery Sales Systems, we just finalized work with three of our customers on their 2018 sales plans. The contributions we made fell into one or more of the five categories you can see below. Companies generally spend hundreds of hours to build sales organization plans defining managerial responsibilities, territory coverage, product introductions with cross ... Read Post

The millennial shopper. The internet shopper. The shopper who only trusts online reviews. The shopper who already uses their Amazon Prime account so much to buy their own stuff, it just makes sense to do Christmas shopping on Amazon too. This is the shopper that makes it hard to do traditional holiday sales in a ... Read Post

Once upon a time, a little child wrote letters every single year, addressed to a jolly old man residing at the North Pole. These letters politely requested greatly desired Christmas gifts, and based upon the child’s behavior in the preceding year (or, more usually, the past few weeks), the gifts would magically arrive on Christmas ... Read Post

The new year is fast approaching. Is your organization set up for success? Are you prepared to leverage the sales trends experts predict will be big in the coming year? Or are you unwittingly putting your company at risk of falling behind with outdated methods, strategies and technologies? If you want to perform at your ... Read Post

On what he loves about SalesPOP! and sales itself, advice for new sales managers, why sales managers and salespeople really do need to believe in their product or service, what kinds of plans a sales manager should have in place for achieving goals and quotas, and how a sales manager can get their team truly ... Read Post

Unfortunately, many people associate selling with a negative experience, where somebody is trying to talk us into something that we don’t want or need. That is why I have been on a mission to elevate the reputation of sales and its practitioners, because SOMEBODY HAS TO DO IT!! According to Wikipedia “A sale is the ... Read Post

Good salespeople take the time to really know their competition, and invest the necessary time to evolve tactics and strategies to overtake competitors. They come up with value propositions and questions designed to illuminate gaps in competitors’ offerings–without ever mentioning competitor names. They share carefully crafted stories about happy clients who benefit from their company’s ... Read Post