OK, now that our headline has grabbed your eyeballs. Here is the secret: work harder and smarter. When I was in the NFL and peeling the time line back further, at Penn State, I used to love working out in bad weather. I just knew, with conviction, that the guy trying to beat me out of my position or the guy trying to kick my butt on Sunday was not working as hard as me.

How to get accurate sales forecasts from your salesteam.
I have to tell a short story here. Yesterday, when I was young, I would go to trade shows. I would go to the break out meetings to learn. Learning to me is always key. I picked this up at IBM. The great company trained non-stop, always providing a full menu of classes which I could attend at any time.

Sales Forecasting Accuracy for Sales Managers

A few years ago, more years than I like to say, I started my first sales job. I sold swimming pools. I played football for the Oakland Raiders during the fall and worked the pool sales job in spring and part of the summer.

Sales Training: increasing cold calling results

Cold calling is still an effective lead generation method. Cold calling is just one method and the professional sales person should have many fishing lines in the lake. The marketing methods should complement eachother and in time, will produce a steady stream of leads into your company.

I love to cold call, I was trained by the original cold call cowboy, at merrill lynch years ago. I spent my NFL offseasons, banging the phone, all day, each day getting over 20 leads per day. I am a killer on the phone. I kill because I out dial, anyone. I love it.

And cold calling has changed. We dance with voice mails more often than a breathing human. This fact has discouraged lesser cold call cowboys to quit or to complain that cold calling does not work. Sure it does and here is a way to increase call backs.

Bookstores are full of sales books which lay out objection handling methods. I know of one that has a mind numbing 10 step process guaranteed to kill the objection and the prospect. Through many years of power based selling I have come up with a few ways to make objections your ally not your enemy.

Sales Training: Instant Replay 

Instant replay is not only for the NFL. I use Instant Replay to get sales details to help the sales prospect make the right buying decision, faster. This is a sales qualification technigue that I invented. Being an old NFL center, I can lapse into football jargon if not checked. What is instant replay? What does it do? Instant replay is the video do over of a play. The play I want to do over is the sales cycle, which my prospect used, to get to a satisfactory and successful sales cycle completion.

Qualify Sales Leads before Time and Sales Resources are Spent

Sales lead qualification is a basic skill. Moving a sales lead to the next step of the selling process and finally to a paying customer. The sales stages may differ across companies yet the need to qualify sales leads is critical. IBM uses a simple 4 letter word to ensure the qualification process is moving along. BANT

Bant stands for Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe. Baseline, to define a lead as a business oppportunity is 3 of the four known. Budget, do you have the money?