What If Tomorrow Everything Changed? Business is booming, new opportunities are bursting at the seams, and the pace is relentless. But amid all this activity, it’s worth asking: Are we the right kind of busy? Some leaders tend to dive into a post-mortem only after the smoke has cleared from a year’s worth of busyness, …
Sales Pipeline Velocity: One Measure of Future Success
In the dynamic world of professional selling, optimizing selling performance is essential for growth and profitability. One powerful tool that can help achieve this goal is the concept of sales velocity. Sales velocity is a comprehensive metric that considers several key components, including the number of opportunities, average deal value, win rate, and sales cycle …
Using Big Picture Thinking To Grow Market Share
In the fast-paced world of business, the pursuit of growth and market share dominance is a perpetual challenge. Sales leaders constantly seek ways to elevate their teams and strategies to stay ahead of the competition. In this blog, we’ll delve into the importance of cultivating a big-picture mindset to achieve extraordinary results. So, let’s explore …
Getting Paid for What You Know, Not What You Do!
The dream client slides the draft of the proposal back to a sales professional in disappointment. As the potential client considers this new relationship, he cannot help thinking that the recommendations are light on details, surface level at best. After all the work that went into the sales professional creating this first opportunity, the …
I Did Not Go to College For This!
Decades ago, when I started building banking markets, I faced a dilemma. I had to develop leadership and sales skills in people that went to college to learn how to be rewarded financially for their deep knowledge skills, not management or growing a client base. Adding call sheets, pipeline tools, and growth expectations into the …
3 Powerful Pillars of Effective Business Development Training
As a leader, imagine you have invested in business development training for your sales staff and now you want to stop by the training area to show your support. You listen as the facilitator talks about the importance of building rapport, making more calls, and asking powerful questions. As first, you feel satisfied that your …
A Simple 5-step Exercise to Stand Out from Your Competition
Many organizations today believe that they are a value-based selling organization based on the premise that they can simply command a price higher than their competition because they are worth it. I will typically challenge them to articulate what exactly they offer to their clients that deserve a premium price, thus proving their differentiation. Typically, …
3 Strategies for Fearless Leadership in Family Business
We have heard countless stories of family businesses that involve multiple generations eventually stagnate, missed a changing market, and then close. The feeling of growing up in a family business is still with me today, having memories of never taking a day off and no one ever complaining about the long hours. Growing up I …
Death of the B2B Generalist
This topic has been debated for decades whether a sales professional is better to be a generalist or a specialist. There is some consensus amongst the voices that agree that in smaller organizations that sell in the B2B world, a generalist makes sense. In these smaller organizations, the sales professionals have to service many types of …
When is the last time you did something for the first time?
Firsts. As an adult and a parent of older children, you start to run out of “firsts.” The first walk, the first birthday and at some point, the first time they drive a car. As adults we can lose the ability to try meaningful firsts and we get stuck in a comfort zone of mediocrity. …