A long time ago in a land far away, I was a Sales Rep for a company that was transitioning from offering traditional break/fix computer services to offering 24×7 monitoring and support (aka managed services) for a flat monthly fee. Although our managed services practice was in a pre-launch phase, I made it my personal…
Hitting Reset at the End of the Year for Better Results Next Year
I cut my hair off the other day after growing it out for last year and a half. My long, wild hair brought back memories of my highschool years, hanging out and cruising around with friends in my mom’s Chevette*. In my imagination, I looked like Brad Pitt in Troy**.
Teach Your Reps to Not Undersell
As someone who grew up relatively poor, I don’t enjoy spending money and tend to be quite frugal. (Or, as my wife Ellen sometimes says, usually when I am wearing my favorite T-shirt, “Sometimes you are cheap to the point of being an embarrassment. You’re not going out with me looking like that. Go put on…
How to Use Whiteboard Jiu Jitsu For Onsite Sales Calls
Some things are better done in person (for my readers with dirty minds, I’m talking about sales & management, not what you’re thinking). Today I’m going to talk about using 2 simple techniques to radically improve your results from face-to-face sales meetings. These will work in nearly every sales situation.
The Big List – How To Tackle Big Projects
My Mission: Build an Enterprise SAAS sales team and deliver $25M within the next 12 months. (No pressure.) I began by selecting one of my current SMB Inside Sales Managers to the lead the team, Joe Volosky. Like everyone else on my team except me, Joe had no experience selling to Enterprise IT. But he was up for the…
How Sales Managers Should Wrap Up the Week
Every manager needs to schedule time to reflect on the current week and to plan for the upcoming week. Some people like to do this on the weekends or on Sunday nights. I’ve done that in the past until I figured out that working all the time wasn’t sustainable. Now I schedule this time during the workweek. For me,…
Close More Deals by Paying Attention to Buying Signals
My first sales job was selling Apple Computers to business customers who visited the Pittsburgh Computer Store. Our top rep was Joe. He arrived to work earlier than everyone, focused his entire day on selling, and always asked for the sale. He sold at least 2x what the rest of us did.
Sell More By Returning Calls From Prospects
Today I am trying to hire a fence builder. My fence, along with many fences in my neighborhood, was blown down by Hurricane Irma. When I called a bunch of companies a few weeks after the storm, only one called me back. The rest never responded at all.
Teach Your Reps to Have a Strong Q4 Close
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was in 1st grade. One night in December, I was looking around our living room and realized that not only didn’t we have a fireplace – we didn’t even have a chimney! I asked my Dad how Santa would get into our house since we didn’t have a…
Are Your Reps Chasing the Wrong Leads?
I haven’t had a professional haircut in more than 5 years. (My wife says, “You don’t need to tell anyone that, it’s quite obvious”.) A few years ago I was looking at some old high school pictures and thought it would be cool to grow my hair long again. So I did.