Issue #125 Humans are no more independent of their environment than a pot plant Relationships Are Part of Product Market Fit All reps are different and fitting the right one to the right customer can make or break a customer relationship. I had two great salesmen in my team: Simon and Mikhail. Every month, both of them were top of the numbers. No dramas or excuses, just consistent results. But something kept happening that didn’t show up on the leaderboard. The rest of the team seemed to like...
10 days ago • 4 min read
Issue #124 Fold Qualifying Into Your Sales Play Quiet Authority Sales Play Enterprise buyers move when your judgement makes the next step safer. Quiet authority is a way of selling that makes the buyer feel safer, clearer, and less exposed. It works in enterprise because the decision is rarely made in the meeting. The buyer has to carry it back into the organisation and survive the scrutiny that follows. This play is for deals where early pushing will trigger defence, where procurement will...
17 days ago • 4 min read
Issue #123 Set Them Up So They Fall Easily Nudge: Make Buying Easier Than Delay Nudge theory sits inside behavioural economics. It studies how people actually decide, not how they claim they decide. The sales angle comes from Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, both economists. Thaler won the Nobel Prize for this body of work. This is not pop psychology, it is applied decision science. A “nudge” does not convince. It removes friction and changes the environment so the sensible choice...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Issue #122 Possibly the luckiest bathroom break in my entire career... Freedom To Win This is a story about realising that interactive workshops are a much better way to sell complex solutions than presenting pre-baked answers to questions you don’t fully understand. Once I tried it, I never looked back, it was clear that when prospects have a hand in their own solution, they are already bought into it. Took a while to convince my bosses, mind you… As I sat in reception waiting to go up to my...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Issue #121 "Listen carefully, you may want to base your consultancy on it later on..." VECTOR: Sales Strategy That Survives Reality Sales strategy should be more than a few pretty slides for the annual kick off. It needs to be a working system that helps the team make good decisions across the year. I built VECTOR, from two unique sources, for this very reason. The first was the planning discipline I learned working with former US intelligence professionals. They taught me the value of...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Issue #120 Your message is clear - go from there to here... From Hell to Happy Ever After My HEALTH framework is a simple way to make people notice you. It turns loose ideas into a clear message that strangers understand at a glance. Clarity is everything in sales and marketing and this is a formula for achieving just that. Geoff knows that simple is best... When people see their own situation in your words, they stop scrolling and pay attention. That is how the top of your funnel fills. When...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Issue #119 Actions Speak Louder Than Words (Unless You Really Shout) A Simple Rule To Make Selling Easier Many people never find their rhythm in sales because they burn energy in the wrong direction. They try to manage how buyers behave. They chase reactions, try to predict moods. They interpret silence as rejection and interest as a promise. They spend more time monitoring the other person than doing the work that moves a deal forward. This is exhausting and it kills progress. A boss I had...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Issue #118 This is the House of Sales - Now Learn The Rules The House Rules: Enterprise Selling When you sell into an enterprise, you aren’t persuading a person, you’re navigating a system. And systems don’t respond to pressure, the way a person might, they respond to flow. Over the years I’ve learned that most complex deals fall apart because the seller treats the organisation like a wall to be broken, instead of a current to be navigated. The more you push, the more resistance you create....
2 months ago • 4 min read
Issue #117 Stop Waiting For Permission Every seller knows the pattern: you know what to do, you can see the next move, yet you stall. You tell yourself you’re waiting for the right timing or approval or the stars to magically align, but what you’re really waiting for is permission. In enterprise sales, that delay costs momentum. That can sound the death knell for complex projects. Buyers move on, budgets get allocated elsewhere, and opportunities quietly die. Your career if you wait for...
3 months ago • 4 min read