How to Leverage the 2-by-2 Rule to Close Your Next Sales Call

Time is money, as the old saying goes. That said, are you and your team making the most effective use of your resources when it comes to prospecting? We’re big proponents of the two-by-two rule at my company. Simply put, the two-by-two rule means finding two pieces of information about a company to leverage in…

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Not Everyone is a Customer or a Prospect

It might seem obvious to everyone reading the title of this post. Of course we know that not everyone is a prospect or a potential customer. One would never guess that is common knowledge based on emails and phone calls I receive. I reflect on the emails and calls, astounded, thinking, “Why do they possibly…

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The Importance of Establishing a Cadence

It seems in nature, as well as business there is a rhythm to the way things work. Disrupt that rhythm and problems start to occur. We use all sorts of terms to describe that rhythm. In science we describe this as a “steady state.” A system, whether it’s a physical process, chemical process, is in…

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Make the Sales Funnel Work for You!

The key to leadership development is team retention. The key to team retention is a solid, steady stream of cash flow into the business! As a leader your number one focus in team training should be lead generation! The sales funnel is an old-fashioned concept for making sure your direct selling business always has enough leads.…

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Compressing the Sales Cycle

There’s an interesting conversation going on in LinkedIn. It starts with the question, “Is reducing the time between customer meetings the only way to compress the sales cycle?” This focuses on what we call wall/calendar time (look at the clock or calendar on the wall, reduce time between meetings–shorten sales cycle). It is a way to…

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How Does Your Customer Make Money?

Recently, I was in a discussion with a group of sales people. I posed the question, “How does your customer make money?” Most of them responded with what their customers did, for example: “They’re a SaaS company, they manufacture products for this market, they are a services provider……” They knew some basics about the customers,…

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Customers and Sales: We Need Each Other!

If I were to assess the worlds of buying and selling through much of what I read, I would come up with the conclusion that Customers and Sales people are on diverging paths, we are doing as much to minimize our interactions with each other. The Holy Grail of these diverging paths is AI—from a…

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Making B2B More Like B2C Sales?

I read a terrific article by Tiffani Bova, “6 Tips For Selling In The Age Of The Connected Consumer.” There’s a lot I agree with, but one point stood out, Make B2B More Like B2C. I don’t disagree, in fact, there are huge amounts we can learn from B2C, particularly in the areas of personalization, customer…

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Buyers Aren’t Killing Sales, Sales People Are Killing Sales!

I get so weary about the endless drivel about the “Death Of Sales.” Ironically, I never see a post from customers/buyers—even procurement—about the death of sales, though I’m sure many would appreciate it (a variant of “What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean” joke—If you don’t know the answer, it’s…

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What Does Your Welcome Mat Say?

What does your welcome mat say? A couple of summers ago, I spent some time in Europe with my daughter celebrating her college graduation and even though I was on vacation, I couldn’t help but see things through a marketing lens. One of the places we visited was Madrid, Spain and neither of us spoke…

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