A story from my consulting work. I thought it would be a good idea for my client to see if they could sell more to their existing top accounts (I’m quite the strategist you will note.) The first step to doing this was to get a list of those top accounts. After playing with the [...]

Social Selling – This Could Take a While
A few things happened to me this week that remind me how long It can take for new sales techniques to be adopted – and become a habit with sales people. I was discussing a situation with one of my sales consultant friends where they are seeing a sales force where solution selling is still [...]

What do you Know about your Prospect?
Here’s another case where sales people need to take a concept further than their marketing colleagues (last time as we going on about using Sales 2.0 tools in general). This post is about knowing your prospect. Marketing types have actually formalized a methodology around knowing your prospect and call it “persona marketing”. This methodology stemmed [...]

Same Sales 2.0 Tools, Different Outcome
I’ve been a marketer and a sales person both. During the years I worked as a sales person and sales manager I became unhappy with the way sales people’s jobs were defined. This dissatisfaction drove me to define more efficient ways for sales people to sell. Luckily for me, Web 2.0 and social media technologies [...]
How Sales People Should Use Email – Part 2
Most of us sales people these days use email a lot. I recently got to sit down with a bloke that knows a lot about how sales people do and should use email. This is part 2 of my discussion with that bloke, Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware. Part 1 of the interview is here. [...]

How Sales People Should Use Email – Part 1
Most of us sales people these days use email a lot. I recently got to sit down with a bloke that knows a lot about how sales people do and should use email. If you use email and sell, this is well worth a quick read (hint: he even did research!) That bloke is Matthew [...]

CRM’s for the Real World
Over the years of sales consulting with companies of all sizes (many ironically in IT), I’ve seen some darn ugly CRM databases. Back in the first days of this blog I compared these databases to a 2-year-old’s bedroom (in fact I should have said a 4-year-old’s bedroom I believe having now passed through that milestone [...]

Cold Calling Tip. You’re Now on a Two-Way Street.
Marketers are shifting their dollars to inbound techniques like being found by search engines and being popular on social media. But sales people are still dialing-for-dollars. Who’s right? Both. I’ve approached this particular problem from both ends. I’ve placed plenty of cold calls over the years and amped up my effort by having an inside [...]

Prospecting Trigger Events – a New Linkedin Way
I’m having a bit of a “Mashable Moment” today (aka this post is about tools/technology). I’ve seen several new feature updates come out of LinkedIn lately and I feel several of these are important for you to know about. These updatesare giving you new ways to use LinkedIn as a “Social Calling” tool (my methodology [...]

Sales Prospecting: 5 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Sell
I went to speak to my friend and New York master sales trainer, David Leaver of Opus Partners, on this one. (You may have noticed a trend in my last two blogs posts that I am interviewing other experts. This is because I don’t know everything). David has been at this sales training game for [...]
