For your biggest deal this quarter, do you know the most important decision makers?  Here’s a quick take on moving from a flat, 2-dimensional relational strategy to a 3-D version - which helps you find the hidden influencers that make the difference.

Are you a sales grand master?  Could you be?  There’s a lot of talk about AI replacing salespeople and being better at decision-making than sellers.  I think the real opportunity is to outsource the boring stuff to AI, and spend more of our gray matter thinking about strategy.

Every enterprise seller promises business value.  Customers won’t buy if you don’t.  But, is your promise real?   We often think that selling the promise during the sales cycle is 100% of the effort.  It’s only 25%.  Any sales team promising value must ensure the other 75% of the work happens.  And if you do that work, you can start a value creation flywheel with market momentum.

Ever lose a deal and think, “Did I just get outplayed by the status quo?” Find out why your competitors (and ‘do nothing’) keep winning—and how to flip the script. Read about the knowledge edge you didn’t know you needed!

Working hard and not getting the results you deserve?   Tempted to work harder?   Before you do that, consider the 12% rule - investing 1 hr a day in strategic planning, before making a single call, writing a single email, or starting your first meeting.

Is your champion both your strongest and weakest point in your deals?  If so, it’s a failure of strategy, not tactics.   But a fixable problem, one you can start right now.  Read how here…

Before "revenue intelligence" became a product category, I hired two consultants to analyze my pipeline. They were building a data analysis company and offered to use our data as a real-world test. For two weeks, they crunched the numbers without speaking to a single person on my team.

The buyer’s process is designed to wear you down. Radio silence during RFP reviews, last-minute requirements, unexplained delays, and multiple "best and final" offers—it's a familiar playbook. The goal is to shift power, making you feel like you are begging just to keep the conversation alive.

The Leading Indicator You’re Not Tracking

All sales leaders love leading indicators. Pipeline coverage, activity volume, deal velocity—and many more– are great. They help teams anticipate outcomes and intervene early. But there’s a blind spot: nearly all of these indicators track outputs of behavior, not the underlying driver of success.

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.