Do you have any idea why you try to get an appointment with a prospect – as your first priority? Let me guess:

you believe that eye-to-eye contact will give you a better chance at a relationship, i.e. they will like you, and want to buy from you;
you’ll be able to understand better what is going [...]

Why do so many of your good prospects not close? You’ve worked hard doing your sales job: you gathered good data and understood their need, you were a trusted advisor, they liked you and your solution. You provided value. But they didn’t close.
Where did they go?
They went off-line. They went back to their old vendors and their internal [...]

Sellers assume that when they make a prospecting connection and notice a ‘need’ that aligns with their solution, it’s time to sell. For some reason, a ‘need’ has been equivalent to an action call – much like when we see a child moving toward the road or a hot stove that we go into action [...]

I recently ran a contest asking folks to define terms. The definitions that came back, even from folks who read my latest book, were all based on the decisions buyers might make in relation to fixing a problem. In other words, they were still focusing on placing a solution, rather than helping manage the internal [...]

The sales model builds in a 90% failure rate…. and we expect that! We build it right into the entire system: We hire 10X more sales people to get the results we seek, we expect and get 50% longer sales cycles than we could be having, we face objections because people are responding to the sales model itself, [...]

I had so much fun with you all in April with my Steps to a Sales Call contest that I’m going to run another one. This time I’d like you to use your own words to define my concepts re helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes decision issues. I’d like to either 1. use your definitions in addition to [...]