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The sales pipeline is one of few forward-looking business planning tools available to business leaders. In order to develop the most accurate sales forecast possible, it is important to fully understand the nature of the opportunities reflected in the pipeline. Opportunities are little more than wishful thinking if your salespeople don’t have a good handle…
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Subject matter expertise is a nice to have, but four personality characteristics are not negotiable. These four characteristics are a leading indicator to wildly successful salespeople in the client- centric sales organizations that I lead.

An ideal customer profile is a composite picture of the perfect buyer for your solution. Its purpose is to focus your product development, marketing and sales communications, and prospect outreach. If you have your ICP dialed in and product/market fit, you should have good margins and short sales cycles – selling should be easy.

Fabulous article in Forbes from Andrew Vest on networking. As I see it, networking is like bank loans – you will get the best results if you do it when you don’t need it. My take on networking: Networking is not about you. It’s about helping and supporting others. If you take this perspective, your needs will be taken…
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What, you may ask, does a post on building your personal brand have to do on a sales and leadership blog? It’s simple really… The average tenure of a VP of Sales is 19 months. Less in a startup.

Check out this great post from Tom Zbaren on Inbound Marketing and Social Selling.

The best (some would say “only”) way for your organization to accurately predict the future is through your pipeline. In order to be remotely accurate, it is imperative to include four things: Total Deal Value (typically 12-month deal value for SaaS or services companies); Sales Stage; Probability; and Close Date. In order to refine accuracy,…
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I’m a big fan of the Evangelist Marketing Minute published by Alex Goldfayn. He recently  published an article on sales calls that I’d like to underscore. Over the years, I have had to coach more salespeople to pick up the phone and call prospects. It’s easier and more comfortable to send an email – but much less effective.…
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I have had the privilege of working for a number of young companies selling complex technical solutions into major enterprise accounts. I love the pace of startups and the challenge of delivering these types of solutions to big companies. It seems the first concern (voiced or not) I run into when approaching a large prospect…
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That is such a great question on so many levels… In this case, I’m, thinking about how long is too long for an Opportunity to sit in the pipeline before raising red flags. The truth is the answer varies depending on the solution and market you are selling into. Most of my experience has been…
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