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Forward-thinking companies are realizing that their sales force is actually an entrepreneurship: it is composed of people who act and think as entrepreneurs. If there is a single factor that separates entrepreneurs from the rest of society, it would be that they make their own games. Salespeople may be (and usually are) employed by others, ...

Most salespeople are very understandably living in the moment. All their attention is on that next sale or those next sales that are occurring right now. Each sale has its own set of peculiarities—such as the buyer that constantly has to be reassured, or the one executive at your prospect company that has a cousin ...

Over the last 20 years, required characteristics of a sales rep have been radically altered. What are the differences, and what must a salesperson be to make it in today’s sales force? How do you define today’s sales force effectiveness? Yesterday Those of us who are old enough can remember the successful salesperson of yesterday. ...

The term insight selling has come about in an era of educated buyers, and is now influencing sales strategies everywhere. Since buyers can conduct plentiful research on potential solutions to their issues, they no longer turn to salespeople until they’ve got a relatively firm grasp on what their solution should look like. Salespeople armed only ...

Be a good Salesperson is an animated short sitcom that is set in a fictional company office, in the sales department, and parodies barriers salespeople run into. Watch it now: Be a good Salesperson.

It would be wonderful—at least for some—if everything could be automated as has been done in factories. A complex machine such as an automobile can be put together practically from scratch along an assembly line, and there’s never a human hand involved. Computer-driven robotic precision goes into every rivet placed, every weld dropped. And with ...

Progressive pipeline management—otherwise known as opportunity management—is completely dependent on the information available to sales reps. It often happens that such data is somewhat sketchy and incomplete, which of course paints an unclear picture of the risk involved in a sale. The poorer the information, the more the activity of the sales force resembles haphazard ...

While the handling of sales opportunities is a technical subject that we’ve been exploring in some detail, there is an underlying factor that affects any salesperson’s opportunity management. It is also the underlying element to sales techniques. That is, the way an opportunity is viewed. A Matter of Viewpoint Often the way that a salesperson ...