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What’s the difference between ethical persuasion and manipulation? That was the primary topic of my conversation this week with Brian Ahearn. And it’s an important difference that any salesperson, marketer, or leader (all of whom influence people for a living) needs to be keenly aware of so they can stay on the right side of [read more]

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{#21 in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories, from Sell with a Story} Every salesperson worth their salt does their best to get in front of the ultimate decision-maker. But we all know that’s not always possible. Usually, that’s because the decision is being made too far up the hierarchy for the [read more]

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Software demos are broken, and everyone who sells software knows it. Greg Dickenson realized that when his boys came home from college for a visit. They needed to keep up with their online courses while they were home, so they pulled up a 90-minute video that claimed to cover the topic they needed to study, [read more]

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Has this ever happened to you? You finish what seems like a great sales call. The buyer says that they definitely need what you’re selling, and the price and quality are both fine. They’ll definitely place an order. “But,” they say, “now’s just not the right time. Come back in six months.” Of course it [read more]

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{The 19th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} Wouldn’t it be great if you could resolve your buyer’s objections before they’re even brought up? Turns out you can. And, believe it or not, the best example I’ve ever seen of that was in the hip-hop movie 8 Mile, starring rapper Eminem. [read more]

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{The 19th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} One powerful use of storytelling in sales is to resolve your buyers’ objections before they’re even brought up. I’ve come across two different methods to do this, so I’ll cover one in this post and the other in the next. The first technique [read more]

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{The 18th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} One of the final, and most common objections buyers have to what you’re selling is price. So, if you’re at the point that you’re negotiating price, congratulations. You’ve got a prospect interested in what you’re selling, and you’ve probably resolved every other objection [read more]

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{#17 in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} As most salespeople have learned, the real selling doesn’t start until the buyer says no. That’s why there are all kinds of methods salespeople use for handling objections. Some of the more popular ones are:   LAIR: Listen, Acknowledge, Identify Objection, Reverse It) LACE: Listen, [read more]

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{Number 16 in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} Value-adding stories are stories that actually add to the attractiveness of the product. They literally make people willing to pay more money for your product than they would without the story. One example of that is the Pig Island story I told on [read more]

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{The 15th in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” That’s the opening line of one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems, The Road Not Taken. It describes a difficult choice the narrator has to make between two different paths, and how important it was that [read more]