Check Out All of the Excitement from DRIVE 2015! ...

I’d have to say I agree with 99.9% of the insights in Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson’s book, “The Challenger”, but not all of it. ...

Flawed thinking has it that there’s nothing important or exciting about the “middle.”  Just ask Jan Brady or any nose tackle on a defensive line.  But the middle of your sales funnel is really important – opportunities have to be watched and decisions made based on status and progress.  Which ones will make it?  Which ones will fall out? What’s my next step?  The decisions we make on opportunities in the middle of the pipeline will prevent surprises later and will help us to put the right resources on the right deals at the right time.  If we don’t make the right decisions, or worse, neglect these deals, it usually results in fallout, or what I call “zombie” deals that linger around cluttering up the pipeline. These zombie deals steal time away from us on thought process, manager conversations and important resources.  If we do go about it the right way though, more closes, faster cycles and accurate forecasts happen. ...

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Inaccurate sales forecasts are a great way to kill the board’s confidence in you.  So, let me tell you a personal narrative having to do with that. Right after getting out of a board meeting once, I found out that my sales forecast was way off.  A few of my bigger deals fell out that really changed the outlook.  It was one of my first board meetings with this particular group of investors, and I was hoping to gain a lot of confidence out of the gate. This did not help. ...

Overview As founder of two market-leading tech startups, and now a third company that is well on its way to be, I have a lot of experience in building sales teams. One thing that I’ve picked up along the way is that you have to be extremely aware of your company’s stage to determine the best time for adding to the team. Below are three stages typically experienced, and the strategies implemented based on where we were at as a company. This is my personal account of what we did and why. ...

As an experienced sales person you can always spot a rookie rep on a bad sales call. They have a lack of confidence in their voice, unprepared answers to the most common objections and then there is the epic meltdown: a 15 minute uninterrupted sales monologue. The client will try to interject, but there is no stopping this locomotive. The rookie will continue to spew out unnecessary information until they run out of breath. This is what we call “word vomit”. ...

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