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 […]

Do you spend a lot of time collecting names that might be prospects?
Do you spend a lot of money learning how to follow prospects on line, so you can guess where they are in the decision making process?
Has all of this activity substantially increased your ROI?
What you’re forgetting – or ignoring – is that no matter […]

Sales has a goal: find a prospect with a need and sell a solution. You can call it anything you want, use all of the fancy terms about serving your client, be a Trusted Advisor or a Relationship Manager, do whatever you can to understand need and make nice. But at the end of the day, your […]

As a sales professional, you learn early on that your need to ‘understand’ a buyer. But what, exactly, do you need to understand?
On the sales end of the equation, you NEED to understand the prospect’s situation to make sure you are placing the appropriate solution in the right place. This same data will give you ability to fine-tune your […]

Buyers buy when they want to resolve a business problem.
Buyers buy when all of the members of their decision team – all of the members – agree that it’s time to resolve a problem.
Buyers buy when their internal system – their culture – knows how to make room for something new without disrupting the status […]

For some reason, it’s very difficult for sales people to think beyond ‘need’ and ‘solution:’  We tend to think that because the buyer’s need matches our solution, and because we’re professionals who ‘care,’  the only thing buyers need to do is choose our solution.
But if it were that easy, buying decisions would get made more often in our […]