There is a great story - from the ‘90s - about an Oracle sales rep who did something extraordinary. Facing a pipeline bottleneck, they invested $30,000 of their own money to hire a personal SDR. The result? A 10X return in commissions in the first year, with benefits extending into subsequent years.

Tired of average? Is this the year you build an elite sales team - one that delivers revenue consistently and attracts top talent? It is possible - and quickly. In 90 days you can lay the foundation for a market-leading sales team. Here's the blueprint - it's not rocket surgery :), but you must commit.

Ever been in a leadership position where nothing seems to work?  Everyone seems to be showing up and doing work, but no matter how hard you personally try, you’re not seeing the necessary results.  Here’s one model to analyze the situation, and 12 potential fixes to improve the situation.

Will you be adding quota carriers in 2025? As budget season takes over, sales leaders are deep in the endless cycle of budget iterations: how many new hires, how quickly, at what quota, and with what support? No matter how you’re answering these questions, if you expect to add even one rep, you need both a realistic plan and you must start executing now - even if the plan is not yet final. Here are three critical considerations that I’ve learned (the hard way).

No one argues the importance of opportunity qualification.  Every seller prefers to only spend time on deals they are likely to win.  The trap that we often fall into is not requiring each opportunity to continually re-qualify themselves - to higher levels - throughout the sales process.  Make qualification an “all-the-time” discipline, and continually raise the bar throughout the sales cycle.

Have you ever hit an impasse while in negotiation? Or worked with a counter-party that conceded to your every suggestion — only to be shut down later by another department, requiring a complete reset of the negotiation process? 

In this article, I break down the spectrum of negotiation tactics that show up most often and how you can move a difficult negotiation style to a more productive collaboration.

What is the one thing you can do now that will lower your stress in December? The answer is simple to say but hard to do: Build a Mutual Action Plan for every Q4 Deal. Commonly referred to as a MAP,  The idea is to create a project plan that defines everything that must happen between “Today” and “Results Delivered”. It’s not just from initiation to contract signature, but to the customer’s desired business outcomes.

Every enterprise sales hire is a $1M investment. Yet, on average, there is a 50% success rate. Much of this is because the hiring process focuses on the wrong things. This post discusses what can be accurately assessed in the hiring process, what should not be assessed, and how to do it.

Hiring salespeople is always hard - good people are hard to find, and the hiring process is less than perfect. This article discusses two ways to uncover bad hires quickly and consistently hire reps who are top performers over the long term.

It is possible to deploy sellers that consistently win and lead the market. This ebook covers the 3 pillars to building an elite sales team - competencies, processes, and leadership - and how to integrate them to create a continual growth cycle.

Everyone is looking for a competitive advantage, more now than ever.   And when queried, CEOs will always include “our people” high on their list of competitive differentiators. More than having great people, great companies have great leaders. This post covers a highly effective way to be intentional about leadership development in the everyday grind of business.

We're seeing AI do amazing things. But I would argue it is not great at persuasion. This post is about how to get the most out of LLMs, and minimize time wasted deploying AI in bad fit use cases.

Every revenue leader is expected to deliver repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue.  These are not separate objectives but are interconnected with a natural sequence. This post describes the connectivity and keys to delivering all three.

SWOTs are a multi-purpose tool for strategy and business reviews. But often, we fail to get the full value they can deliver. This post covers a counter-intuitive approach that will break your team out of a rinse-repeat approach and deliver much more relevant insights.

I read more in 2023 than most years and was privileged to find great books and learn from amazing authors. These are my top 5 favs.

Every negotiation has a budget.  Not the price, but the time, effort, thinking and energy both parties are willing to expend to get the transaction done.   As you devise and execute a negotiation strategy, always consider the time and focus available from both parties to achieve the desired results.

Are you making it easy or hard for your champion to be a champion? Are you providing clarity or adding to the confusion? Do you require low-value work, or does working with you pay huge dividends? Is it easy or hard to buy from your organization?

As much as we want to always negotiate in a cold, calculating manner, we will always have a significant degree of emotion influencing our negotiations. It's intrinsic in how our brains are constructed. There are ways to account for and take advantage of our emotions to get better negotiation outcomes.

We all know negotiation starts at the beginning of the sales process, in the first interaction. Thus, final commercial negotiations are framed by much of what has already transpired. But it's never too late to improve your negotiation position and eventual outcomes. This post shares best practices to make improvements in the late stages.

The well-known 80/20 law says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. If you are a sales rep this implies that you should figure out what activities make up the 20% and do more of them. Easy to say, but hard to do. However, this post outlines 3 steps to improving your sales productivity.