10 Things a sales person should never say and why...

Five Tips to Make You a Better Salesperson.

Can the best sales people become the best sales managers?

SaaS and the Evolution of Inside Sales
In the olden days It used to be that selling software was always an Enterprise deal that required Enterprise activities. You needed to develop relationships with multiple buyers, educate them on your value proposition, demonstrate technical expertise and show them that changing the way they did business was a good thing. A lot of those activities required face time so you had to be onsite with the prospect developing that relationship of trust. Along came SaaS It is not so much that software-as-a-service (SaaS) has changed how we sell - as how it has dramatically lowered the barrier to buy. Enterprise and on-premise deals th

Selling Through Social Media
One of the hot, buzzing, exploding topics right now is Social Media – LinkedIn, Face Book, Twitter, etc. These emerging marketing tools are defining themselves as real players in the industry and even the most conservative of groups is taking notice of their impact. Everywhere, companies and individuals are asking, “Should I be on LinkedIn? Do I have to do Facebook? How do we use Twitter?” Well, before we go running off to set-up, invest time and money, or personnal in Social Media, let’s stop and ask a couple of questions. 1. What are my current marketing g

Make People Want to Buy
Whenever a new commodity appears, we ridicule it, and oppose it, and refuse to buy it at any price. Then the salesperson trains his energies on us. We fight for a while, and finally we surrender. But we give no credit, or glory, to the salesperson. We walk up to the counter and buy the commodity, remarking to the clerk that it is just exactly what we needed for the past twenty years. It is not true that new products are manufactured to supply the demand. There is no demand. Both the demand and the goods have to be manufactured. The public has always held fast to its old-fashioned discomforts, until the salesperson persuaded it to let go. * There was no

Infectious Leadership
What kind of infectious agent do you want to be? Infectious like humor or infectious like the plague? For good or ill the senior leadership of every organization is infectious. By this I mean that leaders’ behaviors tend to be transmitted to their direct reports, who pass them on to the next level, and so on down through their organizations. Over time, they permeate the organization from top to bottom, influencing activity at all levels. Eventually they become embodied in the organizational culture, influencing the types of people who get promoted and hired into the organization, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop – either positive or negative. Th

Conducting Corporate Diplomacy
The higher you rise in organizations the more you need to be able to practice the corporate equivalent of international diplomacy. Whether you are striving to transform your organization internally or working to shape the rules of the game with government officials externally, the essential challenge is the same: If you want to achieve your objectives, you need to learn how to effectively identify alignment and build alliances in order to get things done. Failure to master this critical skill can lead to trouble: it’s easy for leaders who are used to wielding authority (and making decisions with their place in the hierarchy in mind) to get frustrated and attempt to impel peop