Sales

Would your best client recommend you to the person they most want to impress? Not their golf buddy. Not a casual acquaintance. The peer they respect. The one whose opinion of them [...]

A prospect called me in a panic. He'd just lost his biggest referrer. Now there was a mad scramble while he stressed about where new business was going to come from. Unfortunately, [...]

A flood of referrals sounds like the perfect problem to have. But how many are you converting into clients? Here’s what happens. A referral lands in your lap, and you feel the [...]

I had a call from a frustrated client the other day. He'd presented a solution to a prospect. Everything seemed fine. Nods all around. On the surface everything appeared positive and then [...]

No, no, no, no, no, no… yes! Got this from Anthony Iannarino which illustrates persistence… “I called a contact every Monday morning only to be shut down. After calling him one day, [...]

A couple of years ago I bit into a piece of hard bread and lost a filling from a back wisdom tooth. My regular dentist refilled it, but said, “I don’t know [...]

There’s a fundamental question in sales… (and dare I say, life in general) Do you want to be liked… or do you want to be respected? In my early 20’s, in one [...]

Apologies to Star Trek. It's not space that kills promising deals. It's doubt. We have a solar system at home. It tells us how much power we're generating, which is useful. But [...]

Barbara and I recently bought a robot vacuum cleaner off Facebook Marketplace. We weren’t sure what we actually needed or whether it would actually work. So instead of spending $800 on a [...]

I hear it all the time: "I'm good at conversion and sales but I just want more leads." But the reality is, most of us treat lead generation as a leaky bucket. [...]

I first read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as a teenager, and over the next few years, I read it probably dozens of times. Written in 1936, it [...]

I’ve been speaking with a prospect who wants to lift his sales team’s conversion rate. We crunched the numbers — a 20% improvement across the board would add about $1.2 million to [...]

You’ve just had a great meeting with a prospect. There’s energy. The rapport’s good. You’re thinking, “This could go somewhere.” Now it’s time to plan the next step. Here’s where many salespeople [...]

Have you ever stuffed up a client engagement? Where trust erodes or even shatters because something didn’t happen as expected? I know I have and while it’s tempting to justify actions and [...]

As a buyer, how often have you sat through a sales pitch where they droned on about their company, flashed a slide full of big-name logos to prove credibility, and then dumped [...]

Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, argued that civilization only took off once humans moved from hunting to farming. Instead of chasing the next meal, we could plant seeds, cultivate, and [...]

I love the scene in A few Good Men – where Jack Nicholson’s character screams at Tom Cruise with, “You can’t handle the truth”. Which brings me to a question for you [...]