Thought leaders across the web

Sales leaders: Why it is so darn difficult to capture, leverage, and pass on the success methodology of your sales superstars? Imagine if you could help your top performers see actual, measurable benefits from their investment in a culture of collaboration. Imagine their reaction if they knew that sharing their knowledge with the rest of [...]

Depending on the quality of the tools you use and your proficiency in using them, you have the ability to create a positive or negative presentation experience. Your slide decks and audio quality are today’s equivalent of a strong handshake and good eye contact. Click here to read full post

Why did Sequoia Capital – the renowned venture capital firm behind LinkedIn and Google – make a major investment in Lattice Engines, the front-runner in predictive sales-intelligence software? What is predictive sales intelligence, and why did Lattice Engines raise capital from Sequoia? Shashi Upadhyay, CEO of Lattice Engines, told me in a phone conversation to [...]

This guest post was written by Jerry Teplitz, J.D., Ph.D. who came to visit my office over ten years ago. Jerry knows more about how to get your mind and body in synch to optimize performance. He showed me an amazingly simple technique how anyone can get rid of a headache within two minutes. He [...]

David Cichelli, Sr. Vice President of the Alexander Group, reveals a compelling truth in his new book The Sales Growth Imperative (McGraw-Hill): Market conditions drive sales effectiveness solutions. In this guest post, Cichelli challenges sales leaders to stop chasing fads, resisting change, and under-managing their sales force. Sales leaders seldom have the luxury to be [...]

Here is an interesting set of numbers. Totally unscientific, but interesting. I searched for “Microsoft” in Google and got 1.05 billion results. Then I repeated the search and entered “Microsoft failure” and got 36.3 million results. Sounds high? Not as high as some of their competitors. The biggest surprise: Salesforce.com is the clear winner of [...]

I asked a simple but big question on Monday to an audience of nearly 200 sales leaders in Scottsdale, at our Sales & Marketing Leadership Conference: What is the purpose of a business? One great answer is from Peter Drucker, who famously said that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. But [...]

When Eric Berridge (Cofounder and CEO of Bluewolf) presented at the Sales 2.0 Conference on March 7 in San Francisco, he asked the audience the following question: “How many of you in this room have a formal sales process?” And only about 20 percent of the crowd – which represented about 450 companies total – [...]

Last week during my opening keynote speech at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, I went out on a limb to make a prediction about the future of sales: of the 18 million sales jobs that currently exist in the U.S., I believe that only three million of those jobs will be necessary by [...]

I just reviewed the 2011 Sales Optimization Survey from CSO Insights. This research organization surveyed more than 2,000 companies worldwide and collected information on more than 100 metrics related to sales effectiveness. What struck me as most interesting is how salespeople invest their time: A little more than 41 percent is spent selling by phone [...]