Potatoes, Eggs, Bacon, Croissant, Orange Juice, Dolphins. See what I did there? Your brain started looking for a pattern: Food, Breakfast Foods … then, BAM. Disruption. Want to get someone’s attention? Disrupt patterns AND their expectations. Our brains are, say it with me now, FUTURE PREDICTION MACHINES and we’re constantly surveying and assessing for what...Read More

My agile, fit, 71-year-old mother came over this week after cleaning her gutters. They were pulling away from the house so she climbed on a ladder and in the 90 degree Memphis summer heat, cleaned the debris and gunk out of her gutters. The rub came later when she was in the house and tidying...Read More

Let’s talk about your sales and profit margins. How effective do you think your Sales and/or Marketing messages are? Are they compelling and converting leads in to opportunities and opportunities into customers with strong and healthy margins? At what rate? And at what cost to acquire a new customer? (If you don’t know your conversion...Read More

I recently recorded a session for a Virtual Sales Summit along with three super-smart counterparts – and our focus was on Coaching the Next Generation of Sales Leaders. My contribution to our sales coaching discussion was “3 keys to coaching behavior changes.” Coaching is one of those broad, ambiguous titles. Some folks confuse coaching with...Read More

If you asked 10 Sales Pros what their primary goal would be, you’d predictably get some variation of, “Close more deals,” or “Grow revenue,” or “Make my quota and bonus.” I like the “eye on the prize” mentality but question those answers as goals. They are outcomes. They are results. Similar to the name of...Read More

Probably one of the most frustrating scenarios in sales is when you have a conversation or exchange with a prospective customer, follow up with a brilliant email containing a meeting request, information, or pricing, et cetera … and then, NOTHING. Your Follow-Up FLOPPED! • Why didn’t they respond? • Why haven’t they replied? • I...Read More

I often joke about tattoos I would get – if I were the tattoo-ing sort. There are 5 or 6 phrases I use so regularly. They’re soundbites that are recurring in most of our training sessions – that after a while, my sellers can repeat them back to me like audience members that know the...Read More

How do you feel about negotiation? For most of us, if we had to describe “negotiation” we imagine the back and forth pull and tension we’ve felt when buying a car or a house. And most sellers don’t love negotiation either … the fine line between giving away your margin or having to walk away...Read More

I get frustrated sometimes. More often than I’d like to admit. I found myself explaining the story of Jack and the Beanstalk to a salesperson last week, a very young salesperson, who didn’t get my reference when I said, “There are NO MAGIC BEANS.” It seems that Jack and the Beanstalk isn’t as popular with...Read More

Road tripping this to a volleyball tournament a while back, I had 3 hours to spend in the car with my 12-year-old daughter. We listened to hundreds of songs on my iPod. Rolling through several decades of old and new ones. At one point, she marveled at how many songs she knew – as in...Read More