It's a Friday night. It's been a long week, but you're finally at home and ready to unwind. You sit in front of the TV, open up Netflix (or Amazon Prime, Hulu, or your favorite streaming option), and BAM...all of a sudden you are faced with a massive number of choices. Lists and lists of movies, TV shows, documentaries, shorts...they keep coming. There are so many options that you might spend all of your time going through them and trying to pick one. I call it the Netflix Hole, where you spend your down-time looking through all the entertainment options instead of being entertained by one of them. If you've spent any time there, … [Read more...]
3 Mistakes That Set Your Sales Conversation Up for Failure (And What To Do Instead)
There's the old, tired cliche that all things being equal, people do business with those they know, like, and trust. ...Here's the thing, it's an old, tired cliche because it's FRICKIN' TRUE. If you are trying to build your sales success by taking shortcuts and not creating that trust, that emotional bond, with your prospects and customers, you are building a house on a foundation of sand. But it doesn't take much time, or any fancy tricks, to create that connection with your prospects and leverage the most powerful sales tool you have in the modern sales toolkit: your humanity. Build a Human Foundation Too often, we think a gimmick … [Read more...]
You Can Easily Avoid Being a Pushy Salesperson: How Sales Sherpas Guide Prospects to the Next Step™
It’s a Friday night at the local singles bar, the “meet/meat” market where packs of single men and women mingle in the hopes of finding Mr. or Mrs. Right. You probably know of a few of these places, either from your past or because you’re going to one with your friends next weekend. If you look around carefully, you'll notice that they’re packed with mini-case studies of the sales process. There is prospecting happening, referrals being asked for, value-building… the whole shebang. More than anything, there’s a lot of “asking” to get to the next step in the relationship. It might be asking if you can sit next to someone at the bar, … [Read more...]
The Surprise Addiction that is Killing Your Sales Focus
These days, there's an ever-growing list of addictions that can derail your sales career. There are the old standbys like alcohol and cocaine. There are the new ones like online pornography or opiates. Even the addiction to work that seemed like a boon in the past is now a clear path to wrecked health and relationships. But there's one addiction that has crept up on almost every single one of us, and it's especially destructive to sales careers. What makes it even worse: we don't even know we have the addiction, almost everyone around us has it too, and we don't even know when we're getting a bump to satisfy it. The Brain Chemicals that … [Read more...]
The Simple Content Lesson that Quickly Super-Charged my Writing
I came up in a sales world that exalted individual effort. You lived and died based on your personal work and initiative. The more you could hustle and get in front of people, the better. But that sales world is evolving quickly. Prospects have access to more information than ever before because of technology. The buyer's journey is becoming more complex. It can be harder to get our prospects' attention when they are being bombarded by social media posts, emails, and every other form of digital communication. Adapting to this new world of selling requires a different approach, and it's one that I learned from the marketing world. … [Read more...]
Want Sales Success in 2019: Here Are the 7 Surefire Skills of the Sales Sherpa
The sales profession has a problem. Prospects and clients are stuck thinking of salespeople as single-minded hustlers, whose only job is to harass them by calling or emailing over and over until they can weasel into a sales call and then use their killer "close" to get the business. That's not the problem. The real problem: sales professionals still view themselves as single-minded hustlers, whose only job is to harass prospects by calling or emailing over and over until they can weasel their way into a sales call and then use their killer "close" to get the business. That's not going to work anymore. The world has … [Read more...]
Stop the Sniping and Start the Loving: The Simple Steps to Sales and Marketing Collaboration
"He doesn't understand how hard I work on this!" "Her expectations are impossible to meet!" Have you noticed that the complaints that sales and marketing teams have about each other sound just like two partners in a dysfunctional marriage (or at least a pretty strained one)? When Sales and Marketing Argue, the Customer Loses This contentious relationship between sales and marketing is not a new thing. It's been common for sales teams to complain that marketing doesn't provide good leads, or that they aren't held accountable for results. The marketing crew snipes right back that sales people don't understand the challenge of getting … [Read more...]
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