If you attempt to get meetings just to ‘get in front of’ a prospect (assuming that your solution will rule the day); if you present to whichever prospects will agree to see you; if you pitch when the buyer doesn’t have all of their ducks in a row, you’re not only wasting your breath, but potentially losing a sale.

The sales and marketing communities have a historic enmity: marketing people think sellers don’t effectively use the data they gather, and sales folks think marketers give them bad leads. Marketing people are annoyed that sellers get paid so much when such a high percentage of sales don’t close and sales people think marketers are sending the [...]

The sales profession focuses on placing product. While some would disagree and claim it’s based on ‘meeting a buyer’s needs’, it comes down to the same thing: how to get a product placed. And, after being in every aspect of the field since the 70s, it seems to me that placing product, or understanding needs, [...]

1. Starting the sales process by attempting to get an appointment.
I know that Dale Carnegie told you to meet face-to-face. But what else are you doing that was initiated in 1937? Oh. That’s right. The typical sales model of focusing on solution placement.
Buyers only buy when their entire Buying Decision Team is on board and [...]

For decades, I have been a proponent of, and keynoter in the field of, Spirituality in the Workplace. There seem to be different names for it these days: the heart of business, corporate social responsibility, conscious capitalism, patient capitalism, bringing the heart to work. What it means, underneath all of the words, is that we [...]

There are two distinct categories involving buying decisions: the behind-the-scenes issues buyers must manage internally to get stakeholder buy-in for change and for going outside their status quo for a solution and the solution-choice issues.
We are all very familiar with the latter: that’s what sales handles so well. But sales does not handle the former at all: