Posts in Best Practice
What Goes Around Comes Around

None of these phrases are all that complicated. In fact, most of the phrases and the words that make them up are pretty small. And if you really need a reason to use them, consider that what goes around will come around. And negativity has never closed a sale.

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Companies Are Bleeding Leadership Talent

Half of those hired in from the outside turn out to be unsuccessful. That is a staggering statistic, and from a sales leadership perspective completely in line with other stats frequently quoted: a 2.5-year average tenure of a sales leader and only 1.5 years for the first VP of Sales a company hires.

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The Greatest Sales Compensation Plan Ever*

* Just kidding, there is no such thing. The many, often conflicting goals a sales compensation plan is meant to achieve, in addition to the huge variety of products, services, and businesses, make it impossible to have one plan that is “the greatest.”

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3 Tips on How to Lead a More Serene Life

How many of you sometimes find it difficult to slow down and collect your thoughts when under stress? Or, you get so excited that it negatively affects your ability to sleep? Or, on occasion, you experience both but at the same time?

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Leading Without Authority

The goal of leadership is to get others to willingly cooperate and engage, rather than following your directives because you’re in a position of authority. So, it does not matter if you have authority.

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The Ultimate Checklist Before Your First Sales Hire

Imagine you are the founder, owner, or CEO of a young, ambitious company. You have developed a great new product. You have taken it to some potential clients. And some of those clients were so impressed by the product that they purchased from you.  You are now ready to go to market. 

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Always Stay Outside Your Comfort Zone

Truly successful people don’t merely tolerate discomfort—they embrace it and seek it out again and again. Business founders and university students, top athletes and couch potatoes, meditation gurus, and military leaders all have very different ways of coping with discomfort.

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6 Best Practices That I Ignored

Managing up doesn’t mean sucking up. It means being the most effective employee you can be, creating value for your boss and your company. That’s why the best path to a healthy relationship begins and ends with doing your job, and doing it well.

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Is Your Gut Feeling in Sales A Fata Morgana?

Within a business, an individual sales opportunity can be evaluated against all other past and current opportunities, those lost and those won. These metrics allow us to estimate the close probability. Not as a guesstimate, but rather with statistical probability.

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Leadership, Not Management

In mature markets and interchangeable products, in disruptive businesses and first-to-market situations, …when you need salespeople to do incredibly hard things, when they need to overcome rejection every day, they need to be bought into the vision. That is the fuel that keeps them going.

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