Salesmanship

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 [...]

Read the full article →

4 Essentials for Success in Sales

Sales Coach

Successful sales people display the same characteristics in my experience, but those characteristics aren’t the ones most people would expect. They don’t include ambitious, aggressive, gregarious, social, pushy, or any of another 20 we might think of. But they do include the qualities we would look for when wanting to buy from somebody! That shouldn’t [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Where’s The Money

Selling Price

Customers paying for the sale is the ultimate objective of what we do. The sale isn’t truly closed until the customer pays the bill, and in my book also buys the lunch. So knowing how the customer intends to pay is critical for qualifying the sale. But asking how the customer will be paying for [...]

Read the full article →

The Worst Kind of Sales Coaching

Sales Coach

Sales Coaching like this can be dangerous when it influences people looking for straight advice about how professional sales skills. There’s more garbage talked about sales skills than there is about sex, or making money with your blog, or social media marketing. It’s all crap and winds me up because there are some unfortunates out [...]

Read the full article →

Professionals Never Sell On Price

Selling Price

Price is never the how professionals sell. It’s too risky and short changes the customer. Sometimes its necessary to negotiate the price but professionals will only do that once the customer has made the decision to buy when the selling price meets his constraints. Selling on price is a fools game, because the only time people [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries