Shawn Karol Sandy

I surveyed a sales team recently prior to a Skills Building session on Pushback, Objections, and Negotiation, and asked them some of the most common obstacles they face in business development. Their answers didn’t surprise me, but one of the things about their answers that I pointed out really made

We spend a huge amount of energy working with our clients on the early stages of their pipeline. Right now, the demand for our customers’ attention is intense. We are fighting to be able to get in front of buyers for those first precious impressions and to be able to

There’s hardly anything I can think of that’s more cringeworthy to a seller than hearing, “I’ll think it over” come out of a prospect’s mouth after you’ve proposed a solution or put a contract in front of him or her. For me, it was worse than hearing a flat out,

No one and I mean NO ONE loves it when I’ve ever asked them to role-play a sales scenario. It’s hard to explain how many times I’ve gotten eye rolls when I brought up role-playing through a scenario. Why do we hate it so much? Well, it’s awkward. Everyone’s staring

Over these past few weeks, I’ve had strong reinforcements of my core beliefs about sales training: Most of it needs to be undone. I see proof every day that sales onboarding is upside down or backwards. I see sales training that is hype, technique and manipulation-based vs skills focused. Much

Let’s talk about your sales and profit margins. How effective do you think your sales and/or marketing messages are? Are they compelling and converting leads in to opportunities and opportunities into customers with strong and healthy margins? At what rate? And at what cost to acquire a new customer? (If

I recently recorded a session for a Virtual Sales Summit along with three super-smart counterparts—and our focus was on Coaching the Next Generation of Sales Leaders. My contribution to our sales coaching discussion was: 3 Keys to Coaching Behavior Changes Coaching is one of those broad, ambiguous titles. Some folks

If you asked 10 sales pros what their primary goal would be, you’d predictably get some variation of, “Close more deals,” or “Grow revenue,” or “Make my quota and bonus.” I like the eye on the prize mentality but question those answers as goals. They are outcomes. They are results

I get frustrated sometimes. More often than I’d like to admit. I found myself explaining the story of Jack and the Beanstalk to a salesperson last week, a very young salesperson, who didn’t get my reference when I said, “There are no magic beans.” It seems that Jack and the

Here’s another peek into what it’s like to work with me and Sauce Agency. There are no magic tricks. No silver bullets. No one size fits all sales training. No quick fixes to improving sales results. Every business is different but many of the problems with Sales Team’s performance can