Rules, Tools & Attitudes

Typewriters.
Seen one lately? Used one in the last 11 years? The answer above is “probably not.” If you had polled an audience in the 1960’s and asked if they thought typewriters would someday be “extinct,” I’d suspect the vast majority would say, “NO WAY. How could we ever live without typewriters?” And here we sit [...]

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My client, Jeff Jones, told me in a meeting this week that this is his motto: You tell them nothing until they tell you everything. I love the sound of it.
The idea here is that you, as a sales professional, should never lead with a brochure. In fact, you should never lead with “all of [...]

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If I Had a Million Dollars–this is not only a great song by Barenaked Ladies, but also a predominant thought of many highly commissioned salespeople.
In the “money” portion of our sales training programs, we often ask the question: “who wants to double their income?” or “who wants to make a million dollars this year?” It’s [...]

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I can’t stand when people don’t take accountability for their outcomes. Sales managers, I don’t know how some of you do it - listening to excuse after excuse after excuse after excuse…you get the picture. I know many CEOs want nothing more than to create a more ACCOUNTABLE work team. But no one has seemed [...]

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I’m sure many of you have struggled at some point in your sales career to find the contact information of a key prospect. Think about this situation. Your manager asks you to contact the CIO of a major insurance company. You know the guy’s name and company, but that’s it. Your likely strategy: cold call [...]

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OK, I’m not Moses, but it seems to be a nice way to get the point across. Read below. The sales world is not that difficult if you follow these straightforward rules:
1. Thou shalt never SELL anything. Embody the idea of being objective, analytical, and solely focused on making the businesses, lives, careers and bank [...]

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Recently in our SELECT (advanced sales training) program, we got into a conversation about getting to the right person in the sales process.
As we went down the path, it became apparent that it was less a technique issue and more of an attitude issue on our part.
I went back in to the studio and recorded [...]

 

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In my observation of sales people, I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone falls on a continuum between highly skilled professional and poorly trained amateur. The people at the latter end of that scale are not bad people–they are just badly trained.
And nowhere does it become more apparent than when the sales person talks about [...]

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Have an upfront understanding prior to a sales call.
I’ve been called on by a lot of sales people over the years. And few–very few–ever tell me what the call is going to look like. They never send an agenda upfront–they never tell me the process they’ll use–they never tell me what the outcome could be.
Shame…shame…shame….
If [...]

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