Marketing and Advertising

Reluctant Rainmaker’s Guide to Success in Sales

Success in sales is more about integrity than tricks, more about efficiency than popularity and more about process than black magic. These are lessons every sales professional learns on the job – not training classes or books. Here’s an introduction to 10 basic principles any newcomer to sales can understand in a few minutes. They’ll [...]

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Always Keep Some Sales Tactics in Reserve

Sales Coach

Sales tactics are precious. We’d should always keep one or two in our back pocket, ready for action when we really need them. A bit like playing cards, we’d should never declare our entire hand, always keeping one “up our sleeve” to keep the other players wondering and guessing. (For the record this isn’t me [...]

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Where Did the Great Sales Guys Go

Sales Coach

Great sales people used to be everywhere. Others would describe them as natural born salesmen. They meant those professionals could talk to anybody, about anything, make friends with everybody and persuade Eskimos to buy freezers. You must remember some great sales guys and the ways everybody else wanted to be like them. I do. But [...]

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Secrets to Selling Consulting

Selling Consulting

Selling consulting is different to selling product and nobody teaches how to do it. In fact very few know how to do it. Consulting is mostly sold by consultants, and they don’t train sales guys. Why does this matter? Who cares? Sales is sales, right? Or that’s what the motivational guys would have us believe. [...]

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Knowing the Good Sales Guys from the Bad

Sales Manager

Good sales guys are very different to bad sales guys, in all sorts of ways. Customers will have one view. Colleagues another and management yet another. In this post we’re talking about the sales manager’s perspective. How does a new sales manager tell the difference between his good sales people and the other kind? This [...]

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How to Get the Sales Management Job

Sales Manager

Interviewing for the sales manager role? It’s time to release your secret weapon – your own definition of process, roles and responsibilities. And you can get that here. First lets understand the backdrop. The people hiring sales managers are rarely experienced in the job themselves. They might be C level executives, or general managers. Quite [...]

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Selling Software Keep It Simple

Sales Coach

Selling Software is a complicated business. We need to have a process. We need to have discipline. We probably need to persuade customers of the value in new ways of thinking. But for the customer, at least, we need to make it simple. Making complicated concepts simple so others can understand is probably the [...]

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The Lost Art of Sales Training

Sales Coach

Sales training appears to be a lost art these days, Companies no longer train their sales people. Every business wants to hire hot shot, proven guys who can hit the road running. That’s the only way to run a cost effective sales function, or at least thats the way it seems. They treat sales reps [...]

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The Brutal Truth About Sales Management

Sales Manager

Twenty five years in sales management taught me one thing – the job stinks. In the process I also learned how to cope with it, or at least my version of how to do that. Here are my reasons for saying it stinks: The truth is harder to find than rocking horse crap. Sales people [...]

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