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 →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 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 [...]
Continue Reading →Anyone who doubts that everything is changing must be in a stupor of some kind. From my vantage point, everything is changing. And the faster that things change the faster the value of what you currently know is evaporating. To a greater degree than ever before, sustained learning is now key to your success as [...]
Continue Reading →Sgt. Joe Friday was an icon. Portrayed by the actor Jack Webb, he was the ultimate, taciturn police sergeant from the radio and television series “Dragnet.” And his trademark line when interviewing witnesses and suspects, all of whom seemed to wander off into irrelevant details, was: “Just the facts, Ma’am.”
Some salespeople seem to have adopted [...]
I’m weary. And what is making me weary is the endless parade of self-proclaimed “experts” on sales effectiveness who tout their own set of secrets for selling success or their own secret method to create a high performance sales organization.
News Flash: What they are touting is all snake oil. There are no real “sales secrets.” [...]