Building long-term relationships in business matters. To succeed you need to understand how the company works, the relationships between the people, and the politics of the organization. When you access the right people in the buying committee and deliver personalized value messages (and substance) your likelihood of sales success is dramatically higher. In the next…
There is an old adage that says: ‘Companies don’t buy, people buy.’ The message is that, in order to get a company to buy something from you, you have to get the people in the company to buy. Of course, this is true, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that the two are disconnected.…
As you may have seen elsewhere, I spent a lot of the summer of 2017 writing my new book. (If you are reading this before November 6, 2017, and you are going to Dreamforce, I’d love it you could join me at book launch party – Nov 6, 7pm, Novela, San Francisco). The book –…
One of the perks of my job is the interaction I have with so many really great sales leaders around the world. Every day they are out there on the front-line making it happen. In a recent tour of some of our great customers, I was struck by some common principles that are applied by…
The Big Data hype worries me. A lot. Particularly as it pertains to sales analytics. When it comes to understanding the inflection points that should be the determinants of behavior change to improve sales performance, we don’t suffer from an information deficit, we suffer from an insight deficit. Big data is perceived by some as…
There’s a Jackson Browne song called These Days which he wrote at the tender age of sixteen. One of the lines in the song goes, “Don’t confront me with my failures; I have not forgotten them.” A sixteen-year-old wise beyond his years. For those of you who are not old enough to remember Jackson Browne, he was a seminal…
