My friend Alan Ganapol says, “Always read the signs. They’re out there. You just have to read them.” The signs today came in the form of notices that two of my recent articles were published. They’re both on essentially the same subject. I felt compelled to share those with you. The first article is in Business & Leadership, [...]
Filed under: Competition, Marketing | 2 Comments »
Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group, wrote a great post (Early failure is better than late failure) on his company’s blog that is more than worthy of your consideration. (Disclosure: The TAS Group is a subscriber to ESR’s research.) In the post Donal discusses the not-often-enough-overcome challenge of effective qualification. From the post: When [...]
Filed under: Big Wins, coaching, Competition, Methodology, Opportunity Management, Pipeline, Sales Training Companies | 2 Comments »
No matter what side you were on, here are a few observations, affirmations and truths, post-election, with respect to selling: Strategy and tactics are equally important. The purpose of executing tactics in a sales campaign is to drive a well-founded strategy. Tactics without a strategy is like playing darts with your eyes closed. Message! Not [...]
Filed under: Big Wins, Book Recommendation, Competition, Leadership, Marketing, Professionalism, Relationships, Research, Sales Strategy, Sales Tactics, Technology | 3 Comments »
When I wrote How Winners Sell one of the most important messages I needed to communicate to my readers was this: The timeless truth about sales is it’s all about money. B2B sales is not about selling software or strategic advice or capital equipment. It’s about your products and services improving your customer’s business. I was very [...]
Filed under: coaching, Competition, Economy, Measurement, sales training | 3 Comments »
For the moment, we’re busy at ESR. During the past few weeks, even during this economic high-speed wobble, a number of companies became actively involved in exploring with us how they can improve the effectiveness of their salespeople. Another good sign: we’ve been selling more reports, especially our 2008 Sales Training Vendor Guide and our Understanding, Defining [...]
Filed under: Competition, Economy, Leadership, sales training, Sales Training Companies | 2 Comments »
Last June I wrote a post containing my Sales 2.0 Competitive Knowledge Wishlist. I’d expect that any salesrep or manager who really knows how to employ advanced competitive selling strategies and tactics would love to have the Sales 2.0 capabilities in that list. We’ll, we are apparently closer than I thought to realizing that dream. I spent some time [...]
Filed under: Big Wins, Competition, Marketing, Opportunity Management, Research, Sales 2.0, Sales Strategy, Sales Tactics | 1 Comment »
I finished up my second CEO workshop this afternoon in Limerick as part of The Dublin Institute of Technology/Enterprise Ireland International Selling Programme. We covered three critical success factors for building and scaling a sales capability for international trade: Hiring, Compensation, and Qualification and Prioritization (as it applies to the pipeline and forecast at the CEO-level). The [...]
Filed under: Buyers, Compensation, Competition, Economy, Hiring, Methodology, sales process | No Comments »
For those of us who are students of competitive selling, every day of this presidential race is a crash course in competitive strategies and tactics. As I write this, the polls (right or wrong) say that the Republicans have closed the lead the Democrats had been holding. McCain slowed Obama’s momentum and has created some of his own. [...]
Filed under: Big Wins, Competition, Sales Strategy, Sales Tactics | 2 Comments »
The U.S. Defense Department just announced that it has put the evaluation for their new tanker on hold. From the recent BusinessWeek article: “Because of the politics and emotions behind the contract to buy new refueling tanker aircraft, neither Northrop nor Boeing gets the prize for now.” BW sure has that right, especially the word “politics.” Months [...]
Filed under: Big Wins, Buyers, Competition, Opportunity Management, Sales Strategy | 3 Comments »
I came upon a post by Jeff Thull yesterday. Jeff is the author of three best-selling sales books and founder of Prime Resource Group, one of the vendors that ESR covers. Through the success of his clients, Jeff has proven his approach to selling business value works. (Not every company is a candidate for deploying Jeff’s [...]
Filed under: Competition, Methodology, Professionalism, sales process, Sales Training Companies | 3 Comments »
Geoffrey James, former BNET Sales Machine blogger and now Inc. Magazine columnist, refers to me as "the world's top expert on sales training," a designation I'm proud to accept.
ESR publishes independent evaluations and comparisons of sales training companies and their programs and services. (Think Consumer Reports, JD Powers, or Gartner.)
We also coach CEOs of leading sales training firms as well as individual sales trainers on how to grow their businesses and be selected more often in opportunities where they meet customer requirements.
I'm proud that ESR is recognized as the leading authority on sales training programs and sales performance improvement.
For the past twenty years I've focused my career on the area of sales performance improvement, sales effectiveness and especially sales training.
Presently I write the regular sales training column for Sales and Marketing Management magazine.
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