If You Aren’t Building Value, Someone Else Is!

Customers don’t buy products (even though that’s what’s on the PO). They buy value. They buy the greatest value that’s created for the investment they are making. They are buying both what they’ve experienced in value creation and what they expect over the relationship.
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QoS: Quality of Service

In the old days of land lines, telecommunications providers were very concerned about QoS. Broadly, that meant crystal clear calls, connected 100% of the time and never dropped.
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Learning to Teach

I’ve been writing about “teaching our customers” these days. Too often, what I see of teaching is a more advanced form of a pitch.
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Do You Know How Your Customer is Measured?

Metrics are important to knowing how we are doing in achieving our goals. Some of those metrics are critical in evaluating performance or to our compensation plans. Every sales person understands how they are measured and are driven to achieve their goals.
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Don’t Get Distracted by the Numbers

As sales professionals, we’re obsessed with the “numbers.” Where are we year to date, what’s the forecast, what’s the pipeline look like, what are the activity levels, how many qualified leads do we have, and on and on and on.
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The Trial

Trial programs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be highly customized demos or benchmarks. They can be installing equipment or systems at a customer site, letting them use them for a period of time.
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The Problem with Turnover

I worry too many sales executives spend too little time understanding turnover and it’s impact on the organization. Even worse, are those leaders who tend to think of people as commodities, churning through people continuously (but those folks are probably not reading blogs like mine).
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Coaching the Sales Process: Deal Reviews

Many sales managers really don’t know how to reinforce the sales process in their coaching and development of their sales teams. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on this topic from sales managers, and I suspect there are a lot more that are embarrassed to ask about this.
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