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12 Sales Trends for 2018 – Welcome to the State of Flux

By / / Blog, Ethics and Values, Sales leadership, Sales Prospecting, Sales Strategy, Sales tips, Sales Trends, Selling Skills / 8 minutes of reading

The world, more specifically the human world, is changing and moving at lightning speed, adapting and evolving, and getting more complex by the day, to the point where it is becoming too overwhelming for many. Just when we need to be able to really think about and manage complexity, there is a flight to the simplistic to just cope with the day to day. Simple solutions, easy fixes are called […]

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I’m really frustrated because we could all achieve magnificent sales results if only…

By / / Blog, Sales leadership, Sales Strategy, Sales tips, Sales Training / 6 minutes of reading

I am, by nature, a realist optimist who looks at what we can do, how we can make things better and so on. But I don’t do things on a whim, my team and I study what is best practice and look to design, build and weave the various ingredients together to create cost effective, human-centred, strategy and process driven transformation frameworks and journeys that deliver magnificent results and highly

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Professional Jealousy?

By / / Blog, Ethics and Values, Sales leadership, Sales tips / 3 minutes of reading

How those who shame others for selling themselves are the biggest losers Let’s begin with a story about an excellent scientist. Someone so passionate and competent about his subject area that he happily and productively spent years studying the topic, getting to know it deeply and how it affects the world; how it is part of a broader system. Then, with this great body of work and innovative ideas to

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Back to sales basics

By / / Blog, Sales leadership, Sales Strategy, Sales tips, Selling Skills / 4 minutes of reading

I like to keep on top of what is current, what is emerging, and what is still an idea. This is why I make time each week to do research as it helps me navigate my way around the present and into the future. However, I am finding there is so much to read, so much to get my head around, and so much to integrate into my business that

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Sales Trend 11 – Sales to Add Value to Procurement, Not Just Follow the Process

By / / Blog, Sales Planning, Sales Strategy, Sales tips, Sales Trends / 10 minutes of reading

Sales Trend 11 from Barrett’s 12 Sales Trends for 2017 Report is about Procurement. Guest author Ben Shute, CEO of Comprara, shares his insights. It was 1999 when De Vincentis and Rackham (of SPIN Selling fame) wrote ‘Rethinking the Sales Force’, a book describing how the rise and rise of procurement challenged sales professionals about how best to organise business-to-business sales teams. Fast forward to 2016 and there are 15,000

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We can all benefit from thinking like a ‘freak’

By / / Blog, Sales Prospecting, Sales tips, Selling Skills / 3 minutes of reading

Freakonomics Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, Think like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank, defines thinking like a freak as: “…putting away your moral compass and not worrying about what the answer “should” be, but focusing on what the answer really is. It means thinking hard about causality. It means going beyond the obvious to consider all the possibilities — but still being willing to accept

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Align your sales process to the buying process

By / / Blog, Sales Planning, Sales tips, Selling Skills / 3 minutes of reading

To engage with customers, sales people need to think like their customers. What this means is that salespeople have to go about learning and understanding how customers buy. Sales people know, at all times, where their prospects are in their sales cycle. The problem is that they aren’t as clued up on where their prospects are in their own buying cycle. Most sales managers would say that knowing where buyers

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Hone your targeting skills to win more sales

By / / Blog, Sales Prospecting, Sales tips / 3 minutes of reading

Investing quality time with prospects delivers better margins and displaces your competitors. One of the time-tested methods for surviving a tough or slow economy is to home in on prospects who match the profile of your most successful customers. This may sound like Sales 101 but it’s worth your attention right now because when times get tough, the opposite happens – namely, desperation can make it tempting to pounce on

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No Pain, No Change = No Sale

By / / Blog, Sales tips, Selling Skills / 3 minutes of reading

It happens often that what may seem so obvious to us may not be obvious to the client or on their agenda at all. Perceived pain Why? Simply put, if the client or prospect does not perceive or admit to having an issue, a problem, a challenge, some difficulty they want to overcome, or even an opportunity they want to ignite then they will not perceive the need to change

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Sales is still the elephant in the room

By / / Blog, Sales tips / 2 minutes of reading

Sales, anyone? Have you noticed that nearly everyone you meet from CEOs and leaders to professionals services firms, not-for-profits and universities, to the people in the street want to do anything but actually sell and talk about sales? Many of them will tell you that they want to grow their businesses, deliver better revenue and profits, drive better customer experiences, be taken more seriously by their clients, build better relationships,

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