Many times when a new client reaches out or “sends up the bat-signal” it comes after one or more significant sales losses—especially if the loss is an existing account and it came as a shock. This has happened to me when I was an account executive and I see this

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

My agile, fit, 71-year-old mother came over this week after cleaning her gutters. They were pulling away from the house so she climbed on a ladder and in the 90 degree Memphis summer heat, cleaned the debris and gunk out of her gutters. The rub came later when she was

I helped a friend out a few weeks ago. She has built a team of salespeople underneath her in a business that sells global products made by artisans paid fair wages. The organization commits the profits heavily to humanitarian efforts around the world as well. Her team members are NOT

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

One phrase that I hear often from sellers and businesses when they describe their offers really makes me cringe. I hear it a lot from sellers trying to paint a broad picture to capture as much potential business as possible. Yeah, I get crunchy when I hear, “We’re a One-Stop-Shop

Have you ever done the “Sales Walk of Shame” back to your car in the parking lot after realizing you just lost a sale and thought, “What in the world happened?” You didn’t see that coming. You thought things were looking good for you. Your buyer said things were going

I received an email the other day from a company letting me know my order had shipped. The message came from “customerlove@blahblahblah.com.” Not “info,” not “orders,” but “customer love.” That made me feel special. For two reasons: It always makes me happy to know when my package was shipped and

This blog is a CHALLENGE to you. If you’re reading it on a Monday, make something BIG happen by Friday ! I did a double take when I read this statistic on Jill Konrath’s blog, citing a piece of research from LinkedIn “Win rates multiply up to 4 times when

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