Being a leader means having to make the tough decisions. Sometimes you have all the relevant facts before you. Sometimes you have to take a shot in the dark. All of your decisions matter: for you, for your team, and for your company. How do you learn to make the good decisions and to avoid…
As sales professionals, we must accept that the service or product we are selling to prospective customers is likely not among their immediate concerns or even on their radar. You might be thinking that the right way forward is to convince prospects that they should be focused on what you are selling, but this path…
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” – From Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare While someone may be born into great opportunity or great riches, no one enters the world a great sales professional. Except maybe my children–they were asking the doctors purposeful questions about their office and…
All leaders make bad hiring decisions. If you make a bad hire, one that endangers the success of your team, you still have options. While you shouldn’t throw new hires to the wolves and see if they can survive, you do want to 1) give new hires the tools necessary to succeed and 2) hold…
As important as it is to know the weaknesses of your team members, it is much more important to know and utilize their strengths. Any successful coach doesn’t position his players where each will do the least amount of harm; he places them where they’ll each do their best. Great pitchers or quarterbacks don’t play…
Do you have someone on your team or in your company who doesn’t fit with the job he or she is assigned to do? A poor or mediocre performer who has skills sets and potential, just not relevant to the current position? Whatever the reasons for the hire, if you’re the leader, then it’s your…
Thanks to shifty salespeople who made a living manipulating prospective customers into buying items they didn’t need or that weren’t a good fit, the sales profession has something of a bad reputation. This is unfortunate because it’s not accurate. Like any profession, sales has its sinners and saints, with most of its practitioners being of…
If a sales leader doesn’t have his team’s belief system on his radar, he’s not doing his job. If a leader doesn’t inspire her team to believe in success, then she’s destined to lead a losing team. Your team’s belief system matters. A successful team is guided by the belief that success is possible, but…
A friend jokes that the definition of adulthood is the age at which one learns to set priorities. Makes sense, but then, there are a lot of adults out there who haven’t yet reached adulthood! I would say that being able to set priorities is a skill that separates the sales professional from the sales…
“Positive thinking is fine in theory. But whenever I try it on a systematic basis…I end up really depressed.” – Ted Boynton, in the movie Barcelona Ted is American sales rep working in Barcelona, Spain. He thinks a lot about what it takes to be a great sales professional, but as the movie progresses, he…