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Humans have a habit of judging people before even meeting them — often just based on what they do for a living. And unfortunately, just working in sales is sometimes enough to create rather powerful — and negative — preconceptions. And until you can get your prospect past those preconceptions, your job will be much [read more]

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{The 8th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories.} One of the types of stories you’ll find useful in the rapport-building phase of the sales cycle is one to assure your prospect that, when necessary, you’re willing to go to bat for them with your own company’s leadership. Of course, that doesn’t mean [read more]

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{The 7th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} One of the things I learned from interviewing professional buyers was that there are two things salespeople can do to immediately earn buyers’ trust and credibility. In the words one buyer used to explain it, “First, tell me when you can not help me. And [read more]

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{The 6th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories.} One of the things I learned from interviewing professional buyers was that there are two things salespeople can do to immediately earn buyers’ trust and credibility. In the words one buyer used to explain it, “First, tell me when you can not help me. [read more]

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{This is the 5th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories salespeople should have in their repertoire.} The major premise of Simon Sinek’s bestselling book Start with Why can be summarized in his statement “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” It should make sense, then, that in order [read more]

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This series is dedicated to helping you tell better sales stories. But your first objective in a sales call shouldn’t be to tell any of your stories. It should be to get the buyer to tell you their stories. If you don’t hear their stories first, how will you know which of your stories to [read more]

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[This is the 4th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories salespeople should have in their repertoire.] In conducting my research on storytelling in the sales space, I read dozens of books and interviewed sales and procurement managers at over 50 companies around the world. One of the more unexpected, and quite frankly, amusing, [read more]

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(This is the 3rd in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories salespeople should have in their repertoire.) In 2008, Wharton management professor and social psychologist Adam Grant conducted a very telling study. He and two research assistants went to an outbound call center where a fund-raising organization was raising money for a [read more]

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My guest this week is sales guru Jeb Blount. He’s one of the very best-selling authors of books about sales and has written over 10 of them. He joined me on this week’s podcast to talk about his new book, Sales EQ: How Ultra-High Performers Leverage Sales-Specific Emotional Intelligence to Close the Complex Deal. We had [read more]

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Today’s article is the second in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories salespeople should be able to tell. As a reminder, those 25 are the result of my interviews with professional sales and procurement managers at over 50 companies looking for where salespeople are most effectively using storytelling throughout the entire sales [read more]