My recent post, Early Failure is Better than Late Failure, seems to have struck a chord.  It was picked up in a number of other blogs, and the core tenet seems to be one that few experienced sales professionals question.

Right now, everyone seems to get the need for sales productivity.  With hiring freezes, and travel bans, it’s getting harder to make that number, so you got to get it as right as you can – first time.

A recent Aberdeen Group report Sales Effectiveness – Pathways to Productvity, points the way with some very specific guidelines.  These include the usual suspects […]

One of the most valuable quotes from the American computer scientist is: Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.  At least from my perspective it’s one of the most valuable.

I want to use this post to inform marketing and product development about the sales person’s perspective, and why sometimes sales is hard.  But first I want to look at the value of perspective in general and consider perhaps what we in sales could do better.
There are so many reasons why perspective is important in everyday life - but particularly in sales. Perspective is at the heart of communication.  You […]

For many years I’ve preached the notion that, when selling, the next best thing to a ‘yes’ is a fast ‘no’.  Spending time on a sales  opportunity you’re not going to win is a waste of time.  Thankfully some customers understand this, and will treat you respectfully, and will tell you early in the sales cycle if you’re not in the race.  But that does not happen most of the time, and that’s when you need to qualify relentlessly.

I was reminded of this by a recent How to lose by Seth Godin in his blog. I first met this now [in]famous […]

If you’re thinking about spending money on sales training, I’d like to ask you to stop.

Now this might seem a little strange coming from someone who is in the sales effectiveness business.  But one of the challenges for the industry I’m in is providing value to our customers that goes beyond the single sales training event.  Consider this statistic.  When sales people are trained in the traditional way in an instructor led workshop, within 30 days, 87% stop using what they learned. So, for every dollar spent, only $0.13 value is received by the customer! We call this the ‘Area […]

Last June I wrote a post containing my Sales 2.0 Competitive Knowledge Wishlist.  I’d expect that any salesrep or manager who really knows how to employ advanced competitive selling strategies and tactics would love to have the Sales 2.0 capabilities in that list.  We’ll, we are apparently closer than I thought to realizing that dream.

I spent some time once again with Ken Allred, CEO of Primary Intelligence (listen to my ).  Ken, whom I hold in high regard for all the fine work he and his company have done in the area of competitive intelligence, has produced what I see as a legitimate […]

The title of this post is of course very much tongue-in-cheek, but the speed at which information moves around the internet can, on occasion, continue to surprise.  It not just reflective of the global reach of the medium, but also highlights when an idea catches the imagination.

Take the instance of the most famous plumber in the world.  Ever since ‘Joe the Plumber’ became part of the presidential campaign, on foot of his questioning of Barack Obama, the website domain www.joetheplumber.com, has become one of the hottest internet properties.  The owner of the website, who yes, is called Joe, and yes […]

How you act in difficult times defines how successful you are destined to be. It’s up to you.  How badly do you want it?

One of my favorite books is one called “Great Speeches of the 20th Century”. (You can read it for free). I like it because it throws light on the power of personal desire; the ability to get something done - if you want it bad enough. In here you will find the powerful orations of JFK, FDR, Churchill, MLK, Nehru and Mandela among others.

Three separate things I read in recent days reminded me of this book; 1. […]

Lee Allgood, a colleague from my days consulting with ERP provider MAPICS, sent me an email referencing performed by Sand Hill Group and Neochange.

Although the survey looked at enterprise software success from the software company’s perspective, some of the findings resonate with what we know about process alignment and user adoption related to CRM and Sales 2.0 tools implementations.

This is from :

When asked how to best define “enterprise software success,” both providers and buyers agreed that the top indication is value realization for the company. 70% of buyers and providers believe that “effective user adoption” […]

Sales team automation solutions come in different shapes and sizes and they are usually billed as solutions that enhance the salesperson’s ability to hit their target. How they do it varies tremendously, and their success rates vary even more.   The best-in-breed tools stimulate the salesperson to want to use them, by assisting them in creating personal and company success.  These interactive sales coaches have context and understand not only the nuances of how to sell successfully , but also capture the specifics of the user’s products and services, their competitive landscape and their selling process.  They act as sales manager […]

Regular readers of this blog will know that is a charity that we support.  The reason we do that is mainly because the work they do is very worthwhile, and puts into perspective the problems that we think we face every day, which by comparison with those faced by WITNESS’s constituency are trivial.  Another reason that attracts us to WITNESS is the way they leverage technology to support the work that they do.

Here’s a direct transcript of an email I received from Yvette Alberdingthijm (and, no I can’t pronounce it either) who is the Executive Director at WITNESS.

In difficult economic […]