Priority Blog

I’d been working with a client as their outsourced sales management consultant for a while and we’d already achieved a 23 percent conversion rate for our inbound web leads. While nothing to sneeze at, my contracts usually involve an at risk portion for payment. I had no choice but to take on the biggest stumbling […]

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 […]

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 […]

Kelly was one of those individuals most people think has the character of a born salesperson: a winning Hollywood-quality smile; an easygoing manner that never failed to put customers at ease; always a funny anecdote in his back pocket in meetings over lunch; a superb combination of intuition, persuasiveness and product knowledge. He seemed to […]

I started doing outsourced sales management consulting and related work here in Vancouver a while back, but I still like to keep up to date with news from back in South Africa (My accent? That’s it). One headline of business news stuck out for me: “Consultants to be vetted in future” (my italics added – […]

Sales targets don’t make good sales people. Sales people make good quotas – and they do it through a constant flurry of activity that’s developed, adapted and refined over time. A methodological approach can go a long way – at least until your sales manager makes one of the most common mistakes in business: raising the […]

By the time a sales person calls a technical expert into a meeting to discuss implementation, they may have spent 6 to 16 months in qualifying the customer and getting past innumerable hurdles, from unhelpful gatekeepers to competitors trying to swoop in and steal your thunder before the contract gets signed. (Note: This article continues from What […]

“That new sales rep is raking it in very month!” says the technical pro at his two-monitor cubicle as he watches the rep pull his new sports car into his parking spot. “But wait – I’m there through the whole process. They get pricing and quotes from me. I answer the technical questions. I’m at […]

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 […]