Sales Strategy

The big deal, the sure thing, the sale that’s going to take your company to the next level… doesn’t happen after all. Eventually, it happens to everyone in business. Even for seasoned sales professionals who have become adept at riding the waves in a sea of rejection in our hunt for the big fish, we […]

Entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their own startup face all kinds of challenges. If they don’t have the funding or revenue yet to provide for a full-time sales rep or sales team, that often means they need to sell on their own. As I’ve seen quite often with colleagues who have attempted to follow their dream […]

Top management and the marketing department don’t always work in sync with the sales reps to help them meet quotas. But if the company as a whole is going to do well, sales needs all the help it can get! We explored how firms can help their sales people in Part 1 by focusing on […]

There’s always one surefire solution: set the sales quota realistically, without top management pushing around the sales manager and burning out local sales reps –  another conversation entirely!  Assuming your company is sticking with their quotas, how we can get sales professionals to beat this sticky lower-than-desired success rate? Sales training can help. A recent […]

When your company is hurting for revenue, or looking to grow fast, what kind of sales coach do you need? As a sales coach in Vancouver, I hear (and answer) this question a fair bit. If you ever played sports of any kind in school, you might have a certain perception of what a sales […]

Sales professionals are lazy. That’s a good thing. Why work hard when you can work smart to get the sales results you want? And the smartest move any sales professional can make is figuring out who the decision maker is right at the start, before you start wasting time with gatekeepers. Counter-intuitively, the decision maker isn’t […]

“Cold calls!” exclaimed the executive with an almost exasperated expression – not something you want to see thirty seconds into a meeting. “Cold calls are what we’ve always used to generate leads. If they’re not working, we just need to do more of them!” If only changing a sales strategy was as easy as ordering […]

You hang up the phone. Your colleagues can tell from your gloomy expression that the deal has fallen through. As experienced sales professionals, we’ve all been there. It happens. The odds might have been in your favor, but you knew there was something (a competitor’s product, an adversarial advisor to the decision maker, etc) that […]

Here in Vancouver, you’ll find cafes on just about every street corner. Whether you bought your morning cup at Starbucks or some local coffeehouse, chances are you simply ordered the “mild” or “dark”; you don’t actually know (or care to know) the difference between a Peruvian light roast and Ethiopian dark roast. Meanwhile, the price […]

Do any traveling lately, maybe over the holidays? As a sales consultant on the move for clients, I can relate. And if you’re like most folks who flew over the Christmas season, you paid a high price for a cramped seat stuffed in between your fellow stressed-out passengers, bereft of comforts except perhaps a starvation-sized […]