Selling Through The Slump: An eBook

I was asked by my friend Charlie Green representing The Customer Collective to contribute to an e-book that was just published. I recommend that you download it, read it and use it.
Selling Through A Slump: An Industry-by-Industry Playbook
A Guide by Salespeople for Salespeople on How to Sell Your Way to Recovery

Download this Free eBook
Selling [...]

Checklists: For Surgeons, Pilots and… Salespeople

I believe in checklists.  Clearly the medical community just got the message as well.  A study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine this week shows that adopting a surgical safety checklist (PDF) reduced deaths and complications by more than a third.  From the Wall Street Journal:
Researchers collected data on nearly 8,000 patients [...]

No More Gifts From Drug Companies To Doctors. About Time!

What caught my eye about this story from the Houston Chronicle was the subtitle:

Voluntary rules cut out free gifts
sales reps use to influence physicians
The story lead: “The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the major lobbying group for drug companies including Merck, Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb, enacted new rules governing how sales representatives in the [...]

Sales Lessons From The Presidential Race

No matter what side you were on, here are a few observations, affirmations and truths, post-election, with respect to selling:

Strategy and tactics are equally important.  The purpose of executing tactics in a sales campaign is to drive a well-founded strategy.  Tactics without a strategy is like playing darts with your eyes closed.
Message! Not messages, messages, [...]

An Authentic Sales 2.0 Killer App for Selling Competitively

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 [...]

Story-Oriented Selling

This is an email I received from James Mayfield Smith regarding my post about the top IBM sales rep.  I had a phone conversation with James and then we exchanged emails.  He’s got a very convincing view on the role of storytelling in sales (he refers to it as strategic applied mythology).   Why convincing?  When I look at [...]

Strategic Negotiation

Any sales manager will tell you that negotiation is one of the required skills for success in sales. Yet few salespeople are equipped to go one-on-one with the increasingly experienced and tough corporate buyers and procurement managers whom they must negotiate with in order to make a sale.  For years I saw negotiation as a [...]

CanDoGo: STaaS (Sales Tips as a Service)

I’ve been speaking with Larry McClymonds, VP Corporate Sales & Co-Founder of CanDoGo.  Been in touch with his customers as well.
In case you’re not aware of CanDoGo, it’s an new Internet destination that hosts articles, audio and video clips from 140 sales expert content providers (and counting).   The list is impressive:  Dr. Tony Alessandra, Jim [...]

The Upcoming Election: Competitive Selling Strategies

For those of us who are students of competitive selling, every day of this presidential race is a crash course in competitive strategies and tactics. 
As I write this, the polls (right or wrong) say that the Republicans have closed the lead the Democrats had been holding.  McCain slowed Obama’s momentum and has created some of his own.
Here are [...]

Ten of My Most Popular Posts for Sales Leaders

I’m very pleased that traffic on this blog has grown significantly since I created it last April.  With that in mind, I suspect some of you who are new to this blog may have missed some of the earlier posts. 
Here are the most popular, based upon this blog’s Top Posts stats:

Observing a Sales Training Program (Part 1)
Sales Training Company [...]