A version of this article originally appeared on the Salesforce Sales Blog. When you think “sales manager”, do you think of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry, Glenross or Ben Affleck in Boiler Room. Do you think of someone pushing you and exhorting you to sell more and more? It’s time to take the power back. Be Your Own Sales Manager The best sales manager you are ever going to have is yourself. No one is going to care about your career success as much as you will. And the one person who you can’t lie to, or inflate your numbers for, is you. But it can be challenging to decide how to manage your activities in a sales world that’s in … [Read more...]
3 Unexpected Abilities that Will Separate the Top Sales Performers
Salespeople tend to be an infinitely practical lot. Over two decades of coaching and training has made me realize that usually sales professional want to know the fastest ways to be successful, and what they should do to learn those skills. "Just tell me what to do and I'll do it!" is a common refrain. If you're always looking for ways to improve your game, there's no reason to change the habit. What does have to change is what you are learning. In the past, salespeople would look for the "magic bullet". They wanted to learn that one sales close, objection-handling statement, or discovery question that would create instant results. … [Read more...]
Hyper-Connected Selling: How to Avoid Sales Obsolescence and Unemployment
updated June 2021 If you are in sales these days, there seems to be more questions than ever: When will we go back to in-person selling? Does cold calling still work? How does personal brand connect with my job as a seller? Where can sales professionals focus their attention to be successful? Can the selling profession remain the same in a post-pandemic world or is sales dying? And on and on. Every day it seems like even more questions are coming, but very few answers are popping up. Luckily, you don't need answers to surf the waves of change successfully. But you do need to wrap your head around the massive shift … [Read more...]
Sales is Dead, Social Selling is Bullshit, and Cold Calling is for Morons
I want to apologize to all the salespeople in the world. I want to apologize on behalf of all the sales trainers, speakers, influencers, writers, gurus, thought-leaders, and assorted muckity-mucks who have been filling your world with articles that have titles like the above. We're doing you a huge disservice, and we should stop it. But we probably won't. It's Easy to Mistake Volume for Quality You see, we're all trying to get your attention so that you'll think we're smart, and wise, and action-oriented. We want you to think that we have the magic pill that you've been missing. That we have the thing that can scratch your … [Read more...]
The New Rule In Sales: Evolve or Die
If you read Peter Theil's Zero to One (which you should, check out my reasons why here), you will come across a short section where he tells budding entrepreneurs how to market, sell, and distribute their new idea. He's trying to tell them why so many entrepreneurial products/services tend to fail: not because of a bad idea but because of inappropriate sales channels. Are You Selling in the Dead Zone? The book is focused on entrepreneurs, but there's one graph that stood out to me because it made all of my sales receptors tingle. While it's unintentional, it clearly lays out how sales has changed in the world of the internet, and why … [Read more...]
The Mantra That Will Make You More Influential: They Don’t Care How the Beer Tastes
One of the nice things about working for myself is that I get to work where I want. That's often my home office or one of the many coffeehouses around Evanston, IL. Or if it's about 3:30 and another cup of tea will make my head explode, it's one of my favorite bars where I can sip a craft brew and work in the eerily dead time between lunch and happy hour. (I love the fact that pretty much every establishment feels the need to have free WiFi). Watching a Sales Call Unravel As I was sitting here at the bar today, enjoying the last drops of this year's Great Lakes Oktoberfest, a sales rep for a local Chicago craft brewer came in. She had … [Read more...]