When you think about it, salespeople have an awesome amount of freedom—but also a huge amount of personal responsibility.  In many senses, we really are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs march to their own drummer.  They have goals, translated both to financial aspirations (revenue, earnings, growth), and strategies (share, market visibility, brand reputation, etc.)  They develop plans, then ... Read Post

As any Sales Manager knows, most sales forecasting is a mishmash of guesses, unfounded optimism, and outright pipeline stuffing.  And yet, in virtually any size organization, the pipeline is the lifeblood of future revenues, profits, and growth. So it’s science—not guesswork—that should drive decisions. Setting the Stage for Our Big News Pipeliner CRM brings sanity ... Read Post

As previously noted in this blog and in many other places, the B2B sales landscape has changed dramatically in the information age. Thanks to the plentiful information available online, some 70 percent of a buyer’s decision is made before ever speaking with a member of a sales force. It means that sales reps must be ... Read Post

In this series of articles on economic philosophy applicable for the sales force and sales management, we’ve been stressing certain entrepreneurial principles and their importance in sales and commerce. We have seen how empowering it can be to understand some of the root economic principles that guide sales and commerce, and how that understanding can ... Read Post

As a salesperson, you are engaged day-in and day-out in moving deals toward closes. You have most likely given little thought to what your activities might mean in the grand scheme of things, to the world at large. If you have, you might have even brushed them off as having little to no consequence. But ... Read Post

Your success at closing a complex sale is dependent on your ability to strike up a meaningful conversation. That’s because once you’ve engaged a prospect, you able to dig deeper and obtain the insights you need to understand the problem the customer wants to solve. This step is crucial. That’s because you need to obtain ... Read Post

People buy from people they know, like and trust. This is a well-documented fact and as a sales rep, it means one of your key objectives when meeting with prospects is to build rapport so you can earn the likability factor. But how can questions in the sales process help with this? Let me explain… Make ... Read Post

Continuing our series on economic theory and its application to sales, we here take up an extremely important factor: sustainable value. As you will see, it has an intrinsic application to commerce, the sales force, and in fact personal lives and even the activities of nations – and is one of the key aspects in ... Read Post