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In June 2014 I had the opportunity to provide some concluding remarks and summarize my year as president of the National Speakers Association at their annual convention. The year had been the journey of a lifetime, and it was also my best year in business. I felt like I was on the top of the world…
What happens when a customer says no to you? What do you do? Ninety percent of salespeople accept no as an outright rejection and just move on. But that is the worst thing you can do! In doing so, you disqualify yourself from numerous sales. Why? Because a good sales executive will encounter between three…
As our society has become more polarized politically, many people have started talking about the term confirmation bias to explain what is going on. The term basically means the tendency to look for information that confirms our existing beliefs and to ignore the information that challenges our beliefs. Our confirmation bias leaves us stuck in…
Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestselling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which inspired the 2011 film Moneyball, examined the Oakland A’s baseball team and their general manager’s approach to assembling a team that could compete, despite its comparatively low payroll. A’s manager Billy Beane introduced baseball to sabermetrics—“the application of statistical analysis to…
None of us in sales escapes the occasional “no.” The power lies in understanding what each customer or prospect means when they say it. Once you know that, you’ll know what to do about it. Here are five typical reasons a customer/prospect says no and the appropriate solution for each: Reason 1—Bad Timing No matter…
Do you get frustrated when your prospects or customers do not return your calls? I know I do. I may be a Sales and Leadership expert, but when I don’t get a return call, I still review what I said to figure out what I need to change in order to get better results. Remember: Your customers and prospects are…
Does your organization know how to support a sales hunter? As a Sales and Leadership expert, I have noticed that this relationship can be a complicated one—on both sides. Below is a letter written by a hunter to management that addresses typical issues hunters face. The letter is meant to raise issues hunters should address to gain the support they…
When is change the ingredient necessary to success? Do you have the guts to call for a change the way Nick Saban did in Monday night’s College Football Playoff National Championship? His quarterback, Jalen Hurts, who has been working for him for two years and amassed a record of 25 and 2 wasn’t producing in…
When my 23-year-old daughter Amanda started her job in New York City on October 1, she decided to join the company gym and be there at 6:45 every morning. That means leaving for work every morning before 5:45 a.m. to drive the 30 minutes to catch the 6:15 ferry to the city. I figured this wouldn’t last long. Boy did she prove…
For the past thirty-five years I have used option selling to help close business. and neuroscience reveals why this works so well. It boils down to choices, engagement, stress, and risk aversion. Traditionally, sales people go for the trial close and just offer one solution. If the prospect does not feel the risk is low enough…
Yesterday morning I had the privilege of hearing Daymond John (of Shark Tank) being interviewed by Jeffrey Hayzlett, CEO of C-Suite Network Advisors. Jeffrey asked Daymond about his strategies for success, and Daymond said that he is always learning, always trying new things, and always adjusting his strategies in order to keep growing. Not everything he does…
Whenever I give a keynote or work with an executive team, and an audience member finishes a statement or an exercise, I urge the rest of the group to give that person a hearty round of applause. In my work as a Sales and Leadership expert, I’ve discovered that doing so changes the energy and dynamics of the group.…
In the United States we are two weeks shy of our national Thanksgiving holiday, a celebration that can be traced to an autumn harvest feast held by the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians in 1621 at Plymouth. Giving thanks is an important cultural tradition, and similar celebrations of the harvest occur in countries throughout the world. These…
A medical doctor recently asked me what I did for a living and after sharing about my role as a speaker and expert on influence and impact, he shared how he has become a better person—and a better doctor—by learning how to listen better. He spoke about not merely listening to the words being used, but…
We all want success, and we may even expect it in some way, but not everyone attends to the details and habits that build a successful outlook. This morning I walked into the lobby of the Residence Inn where I am staying in Winston-Salem and witnessed a surprising scene—the entire hotel staff was going through…
Loyalty is a valuable commodity. First and foremost, of course, our loyal and valued customers buy from us, and better yet, they come back, again and again. But they also tend to sell us in a way that we can never sell ourselves. As a Sales and Leadership expert, but also as a customer, I have seen that loyalty…
We rarely think about it or recognize it, but we all operate with something known as “normal strategies by default,” those ingrained strategies we have used all our lives to help us get to where we are today. As salespeople, some of those strategies are geared toward protecting us from rejection. Yet when those strategies…
The NFL season opened Thursday, September 7th, with the Kansas City Chiefs versus the New England Patriots. In the pregame show on NBC, they ran a clip of Patriots’ Coach Bill Belichick addressing the football team of the high school he attended as a teen. In his message, he said, “Trust is not given to you. It is…
A client cancels a meeting at the last minute. A customer cancels an order you were expecting. A long-time customer is lost because a competitor has wooed them away. The unexpected happens more often than we might like, and for those of us in sales and leadership, dealing with the unexpected should be expected. Yesterday I…