From the category archives:

Inner Game

Your Prospects Are Like Rats…

by Bill Caskey on December 12, 2008

This is the Skinner Box, designed by BF Skinner and brought to life again by Gregory Berns in a NY Times article last Sunday. 
I love the analogy because it has to do with the impact of “prospect fear” on your business–and on you.  It also might shine a little light on why you feel the [...]

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Salespeople, What Is Your Selling Time Worth?

by Bill Caskey on December 5, 2008

As a sales professional, your time has enormous value.  As a sales coach, I get to watch people work in the market. When I do, I get the sense they devalue their time. They work on things others should be working on. They spend way too much time doing free consulting with a buyer. They [...]

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Having (Or Not Having) the Price Conversation

by Brooke Green on October 1, 2008

How many times has a prospect called and said, “Hey, I need somebody to call me back with a price on (fill in the blank)”? And how many times have you been the “somebody” that has to call them back? If you’re like most sales professionals, you already know that the conversation might be over [...]

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What Are You Motivated By?

by Bill Caskey on August 12, 2008

As sales trainers, we get called in to fix sales problems, of course. And many of those problems begin (and end) with the salesperson and their life attitude.
Frankly, many salespeople appear unmotivated to do what needs to be done in order to achieve. (This is not meant to be a “people-today-are-different” rant.) And this doesn’t [...]

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Sales Training Tip: Talk About Yellow Flags

by Bill Caskey on July 16, 2008

A while ago (Feb 2005 actually) I posted on the concept of Yellow Flags–those parts of the sales process that are “cause for pause” for the salesperson.  Raise The Yellow Flag Post
A yellow flag might be your prospect saying, “We’re going to look very closely at price” or “John will have a little influence but not [...]

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Male or Female - The Sales “Game” Is the Same

by Brooke Green on June 17, 2008

It doesn’t matter if you are male or female; the sales “game” is the same. If you’re a sales professional, here is what you need to know:
• To get better results you need to get your head right—it’s how you think, your intent.  It’s not how many hundreds of people you have seen this week.
• You need to [...]

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You’re Not Sounding Desperate Now, Are You?

by Bill Caskey on April 17, 2008

[From The Road. Bill Caskey is on vacation this week in Florida. But still blogging. ]
When you’re on vacation, you can sometimes see things differently…as was the case today when I was at Panera and overheard the needy plea of a sales person.
As near as I could tell, he was a book designer talking to [...]

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The Inner Game of Finding Pain

by Bill Caskey on January 9, 2008

What is it that stops us from finding the customer’s problems/pains/issues? Is it possible we’re a bit afraid? Well, here is a conversation we had with our in-house, staff therapist, Terry Daniel. He’s the guy we go to when we want to make sure what we teach is psychologically sound–especially around the ‘mind game of [...]

 
icon for podpress  The Inner Game to Finding Pain (Run Time: 14mins): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Pete Ramsey was a really good guy. But from the moment he came in to seek counsel, I could see he had a huge problem - his general approach to business life (and sales) was way off. But how do you tell a guy who’s in his 40’s and somewhat successful, that his approach was [...]

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I got a call from a client last week. She had just begun our program with her company and had heard us talk about “changing how you think” in order to get better results. We hadn’t yet gotten into the details of that, but since she called, I shared with her the five areas of [...]

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