There seems to be wide agreement that the pandemic and related economic and social challenges we and our customers face, will change selling forever (and I think for the good.) The concept of “virtual selling,” seems to be dominating many of our conversations. Digital transformation, more broadly, covering selling, marketing, customer experience, and other parts […]
Great Coaches Don’t Give Answers
Both managers and the people they coach often have the wrong impression of coaching. Too often, we go to our managers looking for answers. Great managers tend not to give answers. As people looking for coaching, too often we go to someone asking, “What should I be doing? Should I do this? What am I […]
Be Unapologetic About Helping Your Customers Succeed
I got a LinkedIn message today from a great sales person. It was intended to be a humorous and fun comment, ” The only reason why I don’t click ‘like’ or comment your posts is just I would like to avoid that my customers can see that I am searching for new ways to convince […]
Reinventing Selling!
The pandemic, social change, and economic crises impact all of us, personally, organizationally, and how we engage our customers. It has forced each of us to rethink, reset, and change. We all know that selling is changing profoundly. As much as some might wish that things get back to normal, we know that normal has […]
What’s Important To Your Customer?
We know our solutions have to create value for our customers. The challenge, however, is making sure that value we create is important to our customers. Too often, we focus only on the cost of our solution. We compete on the basis of price, too often making sure our price is less than those of […]
You Should Be Selling The Way You Buy
I recently had a great text conversation with an outstanding sales manager. The time zones worked out–it was evening his time, so he had the time to be a little philosophical, it was morning my time, I was desperate to find something to write about. We were talking about general approaches to engaging customers more […]
Are You So Busy Chasing Small Deals, You Are Missing The Important Deals?
I’m often amazed looking at the pipeline profiles of a lot of enterprise focused sales organizations. There is, often, a feeling the average deal size is significantly higher than it actually is. Usually, the average deal size, when you analyze the data, is significantly smaller than they think it is. A recent, somewhat extreme example […]
Your Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
Recently, I was in a discussion with a group of outstanding sales people. They were talking about how to align their selling process with the customer buying process. One of the sales people asked, “How do we learn their buying process?” Some readers may think, “Isn’t this obvious?” After all, classically, we know we have […]
Are You Engaging the Real Customers?
I was doing a series of deal reviews–not unlike most of the deal reviews I do. We were talking about the people involved in the buying process. What struck me in each discussion was how few people were being engaged at the customer — and that the right people weren’t being engaged, even by the […]
What Defines Leadership In a Crisis?
The past weeks and month have been, interesting. (If ever there was an understatement). In times of crises, we all look for leadership. We seek understanding, caring, answers, support, direction. As usual, in times of crises, it’s amazing and truly heartening to see how leaders and leadership emerge. So often, it’s from the most unexpected […]
