Sales

Your salespeople have got the perfect solution for your customer’s problem – but how will the client pay for it? Can your sales professionals help them figure it out? Do they understand how the numbers look, even to measure their own sales performance? As we’ve seen time and again with our own sessions for sales […]

Short answer: yes, if the client is willing to put in the work. The person who can guarantee bigger sales revenues is not the sales consultant. At the end of the day, it’s actually up to the client. The sales consultant can advise, recommend and occasionally cajole — but the company that hired them has to […]

Nobody likes pushy salespeople – and as a sales coach in Vancouver who deals with this misconception a lot, I should know. I’m often coaching sales teams to do a better job of refining their qualifying funnel. Part of that job is helping them understand that ‘no’ is a good thing – and I wish […]

I was recently reviewing service websites for a client while doing competitive analysis for a sales strategy. In less than a minute of my checking out the first site, the phone rang – and it was the company calling to see if I wanted to buy their service: marketing automation at work! This happened three […]

Cold calling isn’t the go-to item in the sales professional’s toolbox today. That’s not good or bad – it just is. At a time when everyone seems to have (at least) one phone on hand at any given moment, it’s harder and harder to reach out to a stranger over the phone for that first […]

If you’re like me, you still get at least three sales pitches a day in your email inbox. Spam filters have forced actual sales people (as opposed to spambots, which seem to be getting blocked in my email these days – Yay!) to construct a clear and targeted message. But getting into your inbox is […]

The company had fallen into a common trap. They got complacent about business development while they were doing well and gaining business momentum – until they weren’t. When they lost 30 percent of their revenue overnight from a single client dropping out, they were scrambling. They called me to help with a business development plan […]

Good sales people aren’t lazy. They aren’t stupid, either. They just like simple sales processes – and as a CEO or other decision-maker in the company, so should you. Sales teams complaining about their new CRM solution and requirements to track every sales call or email has become a business cliché. But salespeople aren’t tech-phobic […]

“The only metric that matters is how much you sold.” Of all sales coach tips, this one might be the worst. This idea gets tossed around a lot by experienced sales managers and executives who ought to know better. This is wrong – seductively, egregiously wrong. Even worse, plenty of people – from sales professionals […]

In my sales consulting experience, the problems can sometimes seem impossibly hard — until you break it down into bits you can tackle, one part at a time. I think back to one education organization that needed serious help. Their college was in big trouble.  Student enrollments weren’t budging. They had no sales pipeline to speak […]