A friend sent me the Harvard Business Review article written by my hero Geoffrey Moore and two of his colleagues – Todd Hewlin and Philip Lay - titled “In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers.”
REALLY? BUYERS BUY BECAUSE THEY ARE IN PAIN? REALLY?
I found the article ruefully humorous. Here are some of the smartest business minds in [...]

Selling Power predicts that by 2020 the number of salespeople will drop from 18M to 3M mostly due to online interactions and other sales support functions taking their place.
In the early 90s I wrote a column for TeleProfessional Magazine. My book Sales on the Line was doing well, and I was the voice of reason [...]

What, exactly, is selling with integrity? Is it about creating great solutions that make a difference in companies and lives?

Years ago, when the marketing automation field began publicizing that it would ‘follow the buy cycle’ and ‘place data exactly where it should be placed in the buyer’s decision path’, I knew that would be impossible, using the sales model. As a solution placement device, sales merely manages the last 10% of the buyer’s journey [...]

You get paid based on closed sales. Fortunately, you don’t get paid on the % of sales you don’t close.
But actually, that is exactly what happens: you are missing income on the sales you aren’t closing. But if you based your efforts on the buyer’s decision paths rather than your solution, you can be closing a helluva lot more sales.
THE COST OF [...]

Because sales operates in needs assessment/solution placement terms, and not on the buying decision paths, we don’t consider that there is an actual system to how buyers buy. But there is. And it’s scalable.
BUYING DECISIONS ARE BASED ON SYSTEMS AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT
We live in systems (My book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell [...]