As a business owner, one of the more challenging aspects of long-term success involves motivating employees to get on board with big picture goals. While it’s somewhat simple to motivate employees to accomplish their own personal business goals, it’s exponentially more challenging to convince them that overarching corporate goals are important and relevant, too. In ... Read Post

In today’s mega-technological super-convenience society, we’ve all but lost sight of one particular fact: Life is a risk. We’ve built walls, dams, and roofs to keep it out. We’ve armed ourselves with the latest inoculations to keep risk from making us sick. We’ve mounted the latest weaponry to safeguard us from our enemies. We’ve insured ... Read Post

If you have never been somewhere before, and you are going to venture there then you need to get directions from someone you know, check out a map, or rely on a GPS. Regardless, getting to where you want to go requires more information to guide you along your route. It is the same with ... Read Post

What is Key Account Management? Key account management (KAM) defines full relationship between your business and the customers you are selling to. It describes the individual approach of sales people to their customers in order to create long everlasting business relationship. Key account management (KAM) means far more than just selling products to big customers.  It ... Read Post

You’ve likely heard that networking can be a great way to generate low-cost leads for yourself and your company. For the price of a cocktail and the time it takes to work the event, you can come away with 5-10 new prospects, if you are networking the right way. If you’re like many salespeople you’ve ... Read Post

In this blog series, I’ve covered numerous important aspects of building a sales team: start with salespreneurs, become customer-centric, tailor to your industry, have and use specific personality profiles, and insist reps be self-sufficient. But throughout all that, there is one function you’re going to have to have or the whole thing falls apart: sales ... Read Post

The world of sales is complicated and noisy. Customers demand competitors attack, leaders preach and pundits natter. Too many people “splash and spray” too many messages and demands us through too many channels; this relentless and constant bombardment is distracting and often gets in the way of us performing the way the organization expects. Critical ... Read Post

A few months back my marketing team had asked me to do some research on the impact that bad data has on sales prospecting campaigns. Since they hear me yammer on and on about this stuff, it was probably their attempt to provide me their version of a psychiatrist couch for me to let it ... Read Post