Perry Mason is an icon. The first of Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels featuring the attorney-sleuth was published in 1933. He ultimately published over 80 of them. Mason took television by storm in 1957 and actor Raymond Burr etched the character into American culture. Portrayed by Burr as highly ethical and nearly infallible, it was Mason’s [...]
Continue Reading →Peter Drucker, the “man who invented management,” offered these three sequential and incredibly insightful assertions:
► “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”
► “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation [...]
The majority of small and medium sized B2B firms tend to ignore their brands. But it is actually worse than that. Most of the time, they pretend that they don’t have brands at all. I’ve had company executives tell me that the idea of a brand for their company is silly, and [...]
Continue Reading →A good deal of what passes for “sales training” is dangerous. Actually, it is highly toxic. It is toxic to sustained improvement in sales effectiveness, it is toxic to sustained sales growth, and it is toxic to the careers of those who are recommending, endorsing, buying and attempting to implement it. Well-meaning or not, it [...]
Continue Reading →I love the “so what?” test. It cuts quickly through the smoke and yields great clarity both to the sales process and to strategic marketing as well. In essence, if your customer can ask “So what?” of any claim or assertion, or if s/he can reply “So what?” to any feature or proposed benefit, you’re [...]
Continue Reading →I have only a small handful of pet peeves. As I’ve shared before, so called “sales experts” who claim to have arcane and valuable “sales secrets” to sell are in that handful. Here’s another: Those who persist in using sports as a constant metaphor for selling, especially when they appropriate a useful term [...]
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A sales technology infrastructure is emerging that’s moving us well past simple “sales force automation” (was that ever a poor choice of terminology!) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Sales 2.0 is an unfortunate term in that there’s no clear definition and it is being painted far and wide on everything that someone wants to [...]
Continue Reading →I started my career and built all of its early success on one kind of knowledge: I understood the process and product from deep, firsthand experience. That’s the knowledge that I leveraged. And at that time it worked well. It put me well ahead of most of those with whom I was competing. In essence, [...]
Continue Reading →I love Bogart movies. Just love them. And among my favorites is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Humphrey Bogart plays the character Fred Dobbs, a penniless American expatriate in Mexico who becomes a gold miner and strikes it rich with his two partners. Late in the film, trying to flee with the gold and losing [...]
Effective salespeople and sales leaders are discovering that they are no longer free to design in a vacuum whatever sales process suits their own preferences and understanding. Buyers rather than salespeople now tend to control the flow of information. In fact, buyers tend to be much more adept seekers, compilers, and users of information than [...]
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