Sometimes you just have to walk away from a buyer. If you have read much of what I have written, you will know that I believe that it is a supplier’s responsibility to adopt the customer’s perspective, understand what the customer wants and then apply their experience and expertise to bring value to the customer. That’s…
There has been tremendous progress in Algorithms, Data Science, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence. When there is enough data and the workflows are simple, these technologies deliver tangible benefit. However many of the tasks performed by those knowledge workers in Sales, Marketing or Customer Success are Small Data problems, not Big Data problems, and the…
Note: I first posted this in November 2015. It received 33k views and seemed to strike a chord. I have updated some of the references. Before I started my first company I was employed as the General Manager of a small IT services company. I was 26 years old and for some reason the owner thought…
You can’t outsource empathy. Respect is not something you can delegate. Trust is not transferable. Listening is not something you can pretend to do. Let me start with this: The only way we can express the worth of our own opinions is by overtly valuing the opinions of others. Too many times I observe people sitting on…
I’m generally not one to give investment advice. Stock markets are notoriously hard to predict and, in my opinion, you should never invest money you are not prepared to lose. However, I have found a predictor of success on which I am prepared to bet some hard earned dollars. When I invest my personal money,…
Last week one of my customers asked for my thoughts on the statistic from CEB about the increase in the number of customer stakeholders growing from 5.4 to 6.8 stakeholders. He forwarded to me an email with the infographic above and a link to an article entitled The New Normal in Sales: Customer Dysfunction.…
