Practical-Tips

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 [...]

Let’s be honest -  sales can be exhausting when you’re chasing people who were never going to buy in the first place. I see this all the time: business owners wasting hours [...]

I recently wrote about how your clients judge you on both results you deliver and the experience of working with you. Unfortunately, client experience is an area a lot of organizations fall [...]

Question for you… Do you really know what your clients value about your product? When working with clients we stress that value is subjective. Meaning that what you think is important and [...]

Back in the mid-80s, when I first started in IT industry, there was a popular phrase… “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” IBM sold big. They pitched the board, made [...]

How do you treat your customers after they’ve bought from you? In a commoditised world, one of the few real differentiators left is how your clients experience working with you. Because that [...]

There’s an outdated belief in sales that building rapport is critical to your success. That if you spend enough time bonding with your prospect and are liked, they’ll naturally come around and [...]

Ever feel like your team should be performing better—but something’s just not clicking? Let me ask you this: What if the real reason they’re struggling isn’t skills or effort… …but a belief [...]

Early in my career, I sold high-end IT solutions to enterprise clients. I was working a deal with a big bank. My contact was an Executive GM. Senior, confident, and excited. Everyone [...]

My clients all ultimately want to achieve 3 things. More money, more time and eventually the freedom to do what they want, when they want to. Achieving this relies on 3 foundational [...]

"Rashid, just draw me a diagram. I don't want to read all this stuff you've written!" It was the mid-1990s, and I'd just finished a major project for the New Zealand Cheque [...]

There’s a simple truth in sales: ​Give people what they want, not what you know they need. As part of my role as a “fractional sales director”, I listen into calls consultant [...]

Our job in “sales” is to realise, we’re actually there to facilitate a buying decision. When someone is thinking about buying something, there's always stuff that can get in the way. Your [...]

We’d all love to sell the big enchilada. The big project that brings in the big bucks. But put yourself in your prospect’s shoes.  They’re likely thinking, “This is a big decision.  [...]

In my over 3 decades dealing with buyers ranging from individuals to SME owners and senior executives in large organizations, two common reasons for NOT buying stand out. The first is the [...]

I love interviewing our clients’ clients. Finding out what they love and where things could improve. And in hundreds of interviews, there’s always been something, no matter how small, that could be [...]

A concept I stress with clients who want to predictably grow sales is “Who you target is more important than the message”. A mediocre message to a prospect who’s likely to have the [...]