If you’re reading this article, you probably don’t need to. Confused? Good, I got your attention. The people I’m really directing this article to are those who probably got into selling by accident and don’t take it all that seriously. You know the ones. They’re glib, they’re good, and they treat selling like a game…
Relationship selling is the bedrock for successful selling in the new millennium. However, most salespeople conduct themselves as if they were in a quaint Norman Rockwell painting, building relationships on a smile and a firm handshake, on friendship, on shared mutual interests, common background, charisma, personality and frequency of contact. This quaint, traditional and old…
Employee motivation, in my view, is key to creating long term successful companies. While there are no magic bullets out there, here are 9 tips that we’ve gathered over the years that can help any manager improve the motivation of the people working for him or her.
By Margaret J. Wheatley Berrett-Koehler, 2005, ISBN #978-1-57675-317-0 Reviewed by Ian Cook Margaret Wheatley, back in 1992 with her book, Leadership and the New Science, was one of the first writers to bring into mainstream discussion the idea that organizations share a lot of the characteristics of living, self-organizing systems in nature. Large weather systems,…
If you’re going to sell anything, you must deal with real prospects. Your challenge as a salesperson is to separate the real prospects from the unreal ones. That’s what qualifying a prospect is all about. Finding real prospects is not difficult but too few salespeople do it and end up wasting their time trying to…
Optimism is true moral courage. Determining to be hopeful and positive in the face of daunting circumstances is a gutsy choice effective leaders make again and again. It’s easy to give in to negativity and pessimism when leading on the edge of chaos. Yet, resisting the tendency to give in to despair, discouragement and defeat…
By Dennis W. Bakke PVG, 2005 ISBN #0-9762686-0-4 Reviewed by Ian Cook In 1982 Dennis Bakke co-founded the energy company AES and led it, by the year 2000, to $8.6 billion revenue, over $33 billion in assets in thirty-one countries, 40,000 employees, and an energy provider to over 100 million consumers. He resigned in 2002,…
By far the single biggest concern I hear from managers I work with is, “How can I get my people to do more?” Their number one challenge is how to ensure their employees are motivated. For the answer to this question we turn to the sales professional. Superior salespeople do many things well but one…
We’ve all had them — the prospect that isn’t going to buy from you no matter what. It might be because he doesn’t need or want whatever it is you’re selling or perhaps you’ve rubbed him the wrong way and he simply doesn’t want to buy from you. The only problem is, he won’t tell…