According to a 2016 survey by Alexander Group, less than half of sales reps (46%) meet their quotas. For many sales reps, this can be do or die. Case in point...

No matter what industry I worked in as a CMO, I always preached simplicity-to my team, to my agencies, to anyone who would sit still and listen. I always believed that simplicity was the root of all goodness in brand strategy, in customer experience and in creative execution. So I always look forward to...

The fourth quarter: It's the time of year that sets the course of business for the next year. Before you spend weeks or months budgeting and building strategic initiatives for next year, have you taken the time to reflect on how your current year plan has worked for you? In this article...

More than 20 years ago, in Permission Marketing, I narrated the beginning of a revolution. It's about attention. Scarce attention. Marketers had been stealing it, abusing it and wasting it. Spam was free, so spam some more. Spam, spam, spam. Email spam, sure, but all sorts of spam. Constant efforts to...

Tech is suffering from a fundamental imbalance. Everyone wants to be a visionary without realizing they need to be salesmen, too. It's a widespread and shocking oversight. We constantly bemoan the lack of technical talent, citing shortages of talent in fields like engineering and computer science, but...

This year's theme of "drawing back the bow" expresses our view of professional selling as a discipline and a creative endeavor. Imagine a strip of film being advanced frame by frame: A target sits at the far end of a large field. An archer steps up to the line with a bow and arrow. The bow is raised, the arrow nocked. Now, inch-by- inch, the arrow is moved backwards--away from the target. It is precisely this motion of drawing back the bow that determines the force and speed of the arrow's flight.

If you have applied the concepts we covered in part 1 and part 2 of this series, at this point you know where you are positioned on the sales maturity curve and why you are positioned there. You know where you want to go and what's holding you back from being there today. And...

This week I was doing some sales recruiting for Wacky Links, the toy company I own. I put up a job listing for a sales assistant position, paid at an hourly rate of $20. The position is essentially inside sales, via telephone. In the ad...

You might be in tech, you might be in consumer goods, you might be in media, but you're gonna have to sell somebody. Sales are at the heart of every business, and when they are lackluster, it can spell disaster. Unfortunately, when many business owners see the numbers coming up short, they rely on flash-in-the-pan tactics like...

Black Friday is Nov. 23 this year, but major retailers have revealed their big Thanksgiving holiday sales earlier than ever. From "leaked" newspaper circulars to splashy web reveals, we've already started to see some of the biggest stores' Black Friday sale prices hit the internet. As usual...

Among B2B communities, 2017 brought upon several new concepts, trends and technologies...

Directly or indirectly, solid relationships are a driving force in building sales. As consumers, we ask our friends and neighbors for vendors they recommend, with whom they have had a successful relationship. Word-of-mouth advertising is huge. Alternatively...