Credibility before curiosity: where most sales outreach fails
Salespeople are often taught to start sales outreach with curiosity. “Quick question…”“Are you struggling with…”“Would you be open to…” The assumption is that curiosity will pull the prospect into the message. But experienced decision-makers don’t process sales messaging that way. Before curiosity ever appears, the buyer makes a faster and far more decisive judgment: “Is […]
The reverse 80/20 rule: Scale sales success and fix broken clock selling
The two sales nightmares: Why your sales pipeline may be a ticking bomb If you are a sales rep or a sales manager, you should be terrified of two things: failure, and success without knowing why. While failure is the obvious enemy, success without knowing why is a ticking time bomb. Failure is often just […]
Breakthrough Sales Results Require a Skunk Works Mindset
If your sales team wants to achieve something extraordinary—massive gains in productivity, pipeline, and closed deals—you can’t think like everyone else. You can’t act like everyone else. And you sure as hell can’t set the same vanilla goals everyone else sets and expect different results. To achieve a breakthrough, a sales team needs to operate […]
Too Many Sales Tactics, Not Enough Sales?
If you owned a car with a sputtering engine, brakes that are shot and no muffler, would it be reasonable to freshen up the paint and expect it to run better? If you or your sales team are frustrated by insufficient results, often the issue is that the core reasons for low performance are being […]
Ruthless sales disqualification closes more deals
Sales is not a numbers game. It is a probabilities game. The #1 way to impact those probabilities is to stop spending time on LQLVLP (low quality low value low probability) leads early. Top performing reps and teams, in the early stages, practice proactive, even savage, disqualification. They throw weak suspects down the stairs with […]
Sell business outcomes to close the client
Too many salespeople focus on what they offer rather than what their buyer actually wants to achieve. They emphasize features, benefits, and even competitive advantages—without fully understanding the business outcomes that truly matter to the prospect. This is a mistake that slows down sales cycles, weakens perceived value, and makes it harder to close deals. […]
Why outside sales closers don’t focus on closing
An observation from the sales minefields… salespeople and sales managers that make “closing” a super priority talk to too many prospects that will not buy, or will buy too little or buy at too small a profit margin. Salespeople and sales managers that have a steady stream of qualified desired prospects that buy a lot […]
You got the discovery call or first sales conversation. Now what?
Benefit from an Email sequence when cold calling
True story. How a $500,000 account closed because of a stupid simple follow-up email sequence from a cold call. The result was not typical, but you can boost results using this strategy. A coaching client I worked with called me from his car, having just left a client meeting. “Scott, that Email follow-up system we set […]
B2B appointment setting turnaround strategy examples
Bold Action Can Instantly Boost Appointment Setting Results and Outside Sales Commissions. Whatever you do in sales, you do at the expense of something else. When you choose to prospect a group of companies, you choose to call them rather than call others. When you choose to continue to call upon an account without progress […]