Recession Proof: Feature Dumps are Useless
Selling in a recession is hard. Period. Companies are becoming extra cost conscious, they’re evaluating every aspect of their business for things to cull. Becoming recession proof requires you to stop...
Blog
Articles that will change your game
How to Sell in a Recession – What You Need to Know
Learning how to sell in a recession is hard. Unfortunately, when it comes to selling during a recession conventional wisdom is failing most salespeople. Much of the advice is hollow and not useful to achieving...
Grow Sales By Identifying Your Prospect’s Problem
Do you know what problems your customers might have, probably have or most certainly have? When you reach out to a customer or prospect, do you have a good idea what problems they are challenged with BEFORE...
4 Must Have Elements of a Sales Coaching Cadence
Sales coaching is the most valuable element of a sales team. If you don’t buy into this, you can stop reading. This post is about getting the most out of coaching your people, why sales coaching is important,...
Social Selling – How To Use LinkedIn Properly
Last week we talked about why it’s vital to not use LinkedIn as a cold selling platform. A bunch of you didn’t agree and wanted more on the right way to use LinkedIn and social selling to further your sales....
The 3 Key Elements to Effective Sales Coaching
Sales coaching has one purpose and that is to make the salesperson better. It’s that simple. Coaching is about analyzing what a salesperson is doing in order to enhance their skills and improve their...
Salespeople, Stop Making This 1 Common LinkedIn Mistake
LinkedIn is a powerful tool to engage with your peers and potential customers. Of all the common LinkedIn mistakes this one can kill your credibility, reputation, and make you seem super needy and desperate....
The 5 Sales Leadership Styles
There is nothing more important than the sales leader when it comes to driving revenue and creating successful sales organizations. Sales teams live and die on the strength and ability of its leaders. There...
Discovery Fatigue is Real
I want to talk about something I’ve seen a lot of and I want to set the record straight. Discovery fatigue. The other day I was reading a LinkedIn post where someone was talking about you must...
Sales Culture Needs to Change: Sales Objections – The Costly Sign of Horrible Selling
Let’s talk about sales objections. Part 4 of why the sales culture needs to change. Sales objections are the quintessential sign that you sold it wrong. Let that sink in for a second. If you’re getting...
Gap Selling Lessons From Wolf of Wall Street
Gap Selling Lessons From Wolf of Wall Street: At this point most, if not all, of us have seen this scene from Wolf of Wall Street. It’s cheesy, sleazy, gross, manipulative, pick an adjective. But, there...
Sales Culture Needs to Change: This is a Horrible Discovery Question
Part 3 of Why the Sales Culture today sucks. Bad discovery questions are ruining your credibility and discounting the entire profession. We’ve become manipulative talking heads. We need to break free....
How To Know When A Deal Is Ready To Close
I’ve spent a lot of time with a lot of sales people and one of the biggest problems I see is rarely, too rarely, do sales people know when a deal is ready to close. Unfortunately, sales people rely on...
Maximize SaaS Sales Revenue: Prioritize your Customers
Maximize SaaS Sales Revenue: Your existing customer base is gold, right? We’ve all heard it before, the cost of acquiring a new customer far out weighs keeping an existing one. This is even more true in the...
Gap Selling Testimonial: How ASG Helped ARMS Reliability Reach Acquisition
Gap Selling Testimonial: Closing a 7 Million Dollar Gap In 12 Months. What can a 38% Increase in Bookings, 50% Increase in Conversions, and closing a 29% Growth Gap do for a company? Acquisition by a Fortune...
Sales Culture Needs to Change: It’s Time To Kill The Pitch
Part 2 of Why the Sales Culture today sucks. There’s a whole bunch of reasons – selfishness, sales professionals being self-absorbed, everything related to the last 50-75 years of shitty sales culture. ...
Coaches Don’t Play
This one is real simple – Coaches don’t play. Coaches coach, players play. Back in 2011, the New England Patriots and New York Jets were scheduled to meet in the playoffs. In the week...
Sales Culture Needs to Change
Listen up we need to change the sales culture. It’s a complete shit show. I had a dude reach out to me the other day and he said something like “I don’t know you but I’ve been following you,...
Problem Finders vs. Solution Creators – The Stain of Resistance
Problem finders are everywhere. Finding a problem is easy. Your car won’t start. Yup, you found a problem. Revenue is down, yup another problem. Your advertising isn’t working, yup you found another...
Enough! You’re Not An Entrepreneur
I’ve gotta get this shit of my chest. You’re not an entrepreneur. I fucking love all the opportunity that is out there today. It has NEVER been a better time to start a business, to go out on your...
How to Give Value in Your Cold Sales Emails
Your cold sales emails, cold calls, and outreach suck. Here’s why and here’s how to fix it. I’m gonna give you guys some homework to go home with this weekend and you’re gonna...
How to Handle a Price Objection in Sales
I want to take a second to talk pricing, price objections, dealing with pushback, and dealing with negotiation on price. Listen, you don’t owe your buyer a price. I know a lot of times buyers come...
Sales Performance Metrics: 6 Killer Individual Sales Stats to Measure Your Sales Reps
Quota attainment is not the end all be all when it comes to measuring sales representative performance. Over analyzing all the data we can collect is also inefficient and useless. We need to find the happy...
How To Be More Buyer-Centric In Your Discoveries
I often get asked by people – how do I get better at understanding my buyers? How do I become more problem-centric? How do I become more buyer-centric? How do I get the information that helps me do...
8 Reasons Great Leaders Let People Fail
Sales leaders – do you let people fail? How comfortable are you letting failure happen? Are you OK letting your sales manager make a mistake? Are you OK letting the sales rep lose a deal? What do you do...
Sales Coachability – Why it’s the Most Important Trait for a Sales Employee
There is one trait that if a salesperson does not have I will not hire under any circumstances, no exceptions. I say the same thing to my clients, do not hire salespeople who don’t have this skill....
Affordability Vs. Budget – Know The Difference
There’s a difference between affordability and budget. To be a good salesperson, sales team, or sales leader you must know the difference. af-ford-a-bil-i-ty – noun — the state of being cheap...
Discovery Questions: This 1 Question Is Killing Your Credibility
Bad discovery questions can be the difference between gaining your client’s trust or destroying your credibility. This 1 question is destroying your credibility and in turn destroying your...
8 Key Elements to Killer Sales and Marketing Emails that Win
Email is a critical tool in almost every profession today. Sales and marketing emails are one of, if not the most important touchpoint in the business world. Below are 8 key elements to make sure you’re...
How Salespeople Lie In A Way That Let’s Them Believe They Aren’t
Some salespeople lie. They don’t believe they do but they do. Salespeople lie to make a sale. Salespeople lie to get you to buy what they want you to buy. Salespeople lie to promote their agenda, not...
How To Be A Great Salesperson – 8 Things To Separate Yourself From Good Salespeople
Good and great salespeople both know their products, they both understand their customers, and they both make their numbers. The difference between good and great salespeople is HOW they do their job. To...
Learn To Sell A Must Have Product: Why Nice To Have Products Are A Myth
You must learn to sell a must have product to be successful. Nice to have products are not sustainable products for any company. They have high churn rates, low urgency, and long sales cycles. Must have...
5 Keys to the Best Sales Training
The Best Sales Training or Just Sales Training? Sales training has been around for about 75-100 years. In spite of its longevity, the jury is still out, as many organizations wonder does sales training...
The #1 Most Common Sales Mistake
I’m going to share with you why salespeople are losing the deals they’re losing, why the deals get stuck, why they can’t overcome objections, and why they don’t close. I’m going to...
What a Killer Deal Strategy Looks Like
Getting your prospect engaged, getting them on the proverbial hook is critical to selling. Prospecting is the holy grail of sales and it get’s a lot of attention as it should. To most of us, finding and...
Testimonial: Convincing a Customer to Change is Hard – How Ryan Cannady Uses Gap Selling to Make it Easier
Change is hard: how Ryan Cannady increased membership 5X, Convincing a customer to change from a competitor to your product or service is a challenge faced by almost every company at one point or...
Identify and Understand Your Prospect’s Problems to Grow Sales
To be a Problem-Centric™ seller you need to be able to identify and have a deep understanding of the potential prospect’s problems before anything else. Do you know what problems your customers...
Testimonial: Invest in Your Employees > Increase SaaS Values 300%
300% increase in SaaS value, 20% increase in win rates, increasing employee satisfaction – How Cart.com created a winning sales culture. (Hint: Invest in your employees) Sales training does not...
Testimonial: 3 Benefits of Gap Selling: Improve Close Rates, Eliminate Budget Restrictions, Gain Additional Customer Insights
3 Benefits of Gap Selling – 1. Improve close rates 2. Eliminate budget discussions 3. Gain insights into client problems you didn’t know existed. Mark Cope, has been through Gap Selling Training with 2...
Testimonial: Throw Out Your Sales Scripts – Harness Your Team’s Critical Thinking To Engage Buyers
Stagnated salesforce, Misaligned sales team, sales reps just going through the motions? Stop reading sales scripts, stop reacting, and stop trying to establish a formula to make a sale happen. Enhance your...
How Can You Double Your Sales Record? Ask Limble’s Alec McCullough.
Is it possible to double your sales records, double your close rates, and push more deals forward? A tall task for some, but as Alec McCullough, Natalie Harbin, and Jeremy Vujnovich of Limble CMMS will tell...
Testimonial: How Matt Gahr and Emburse Increased Bookings 140%
Increased bookings, higher close rates, beat competitors more consistently – the outcomes Matt Gahr, CRO of Emburse achieved after implementing Gap Selling. Emburse had recently completed a number...
Technical Problems Vs. Business Problems: Stop Selling to Technical Problems.
We’re told to go find our customers problems and solve them. Easy enough, right? Well, not exactly. There are a lot different types of problems and not all problems are equal. And if we target the wrong...
Order Takers vs. Order Makers
In sales there are order takers and order makers. Order takers are reactive. They listen and respond to customers requests. They respond to RFP’s. They give the customer what they ask for. Order...
Sales Myth – People Buy From People They Like
Sales myths and catch phrases are thrown around in trainings and casual conversations constantly. If another person marches out the tired old sales myth “people buy from people they like.” I’m going to...
The 8 Best Sales Books
Whether you’re new in your sales career or in search of fresh content to up your game, picking a solid sales book can be just the thing to get you back on track. Since there are endless options to choose from,...
The 8 Questions Every Sales Manager Needs To Ask In A Deal Review
It’s a sales manager’s job to know whether or not a salesperson is going to make quota. Part of that process is understanding what deals are real and will close, and which won’t. Deal reviews...
Be a Good Buyer (Note to Buyers)
I’m going to flip the script today. This blog normally helps sales people and sales leaders be better. This post is gonna go a different route. Today, I’m gonna help the buyer be a good buyer....
What To Do When a Prospect Goes Dark
There is nothing more frustrating to a sales person than when a client goes dark. Your last conversation was killer, you both agreed that your solution made sense. The prospect said they needed to share it...
Hey Salespeople: If This Isn’t In Your CRM, You’re In Trouble
Salespeople: Where Is It? If you’re a salesperson, take a look at all the opportunities in your CRM. If you’re a sales manager, or the CRO, or even the CEO, go look at the opportunities your...
What You Don’t Know About Your Pipeline That’s Killing Your Sales
What do your sales pipeline stages look like? How many do you have? Are they working, and does your pipeline tell you what you need to know? If you’re like most sales organizations, your pipeline stages...
The Best Sales Trainings and How to Choose the Right One
How to Choose the Best Sales Training for Your Team So you’re looking for sales training for your team. There are literally decades of sales trainings and methodologies to choose from, each with its own...
Why Missing Quota In Q3 Is What You Need to Fill Your Pipeline
Do You Have Time to Fill Your Pipeline? When it comes to making quota, there are a number of critical success factors, but the most critical and often undervalued is time. Time is without a doubt one of the...
Sales Training Comparison: MEDDIC Sales Process vs Gap Selling Sales Methodology
We’re often asked, what’s the difference between Gap Selling Sales Training and MEDDIC Sales Training. In many cases when comparing two different methodologies or approaches it can be pretty...
Bookings vs. Revenue in Sales
So many salespeople think there is no difference between booking and revenue. Many may not even have heard the word “bookings.” For most transactions, there is no difference. Bookings and revenue...
Gap Selling in Practice: Aligning Decision Criteria During Discovery
Gap Selling Tip #3: Concept: Ensuring decision criteria aligns with solving the problem you discover Why? “The point of (aligning decision criteria & what you learn in discovery) is...
Selling Products Vs Services: Here’s The Difference
Selling products vs services: What’s the difference? I get this question a lot. Here’s the answer and I’ll make it as simple and as clear as possible. I think it’s important,...
To Build or Kill: Your Responsibility as a Sales Leader
As a sales leader, what do you do when one of your sales people loses a big deal? Do you kick the shit out of them by calling out everything they did wrong? Do you play Monday morning quarterback and point out...
Learn to Ask Why [Gap Selling Principles to Help You Sell Better]
If you’re going to become successful at Gap Selling you need to start asking why. Why? Kids are great at asking why. They accept the fact that they don’t know very much, so they just...
Don’t Confuse Your Experience with Your Expertise
There is a real difference between experience and expertise. Too many of us confuse the two, and they are not the same. Experience simply marks the time we’ve been doing something, but it’s a bad...
How to Scale a Sales Team in the 21st Century
Growth is what it’s all about in the world of business, especially in SaaS and technology. But growing effectively is key to successfully scale a sales team. We all want to get big. We all want to...
13 Must Read Sales Books to Become a Badass Salesperson
A lot has changed in the sales world in the last 13 years. Inside sales, inbound, outbound, Account Based Marketing, lead generation, buyers journey, etc. are just a few of the new terms that have penetrated...
Tell Your Customer “No”! During Prospecting
Here’s the deal. When you’re prospecting, leads can be demanding, They will ask for a lot, but it doesn’t mean you have to say yes every time. Can you tell your customer or prospect...
11 Things Great Salespeople Don’t Do
There always seems to be lots of ideas and discussion around what great salespeople do. I think it’s just human nature to evaluate success and emulate it. We take inventory of what the successful are...
Gap Selling in Practice: Problem-Centric vs. Product-Centric
Cold outreach is hard. But when you utilize problem-centric Gap Selling, things get a lot easier. Welcome to Gap Selling In Practice, Tip #2. Me again, with a simple question – When you think of...
Define Everything: How to Execute the Best Sales Discovery
Executing the best sales discovery. You don’t define everything. That’s the number one problem doing discoveries. Everybody thinks they do a discovery but defining everything is the most important...
Sales Training for Cyber Security & Insurance
When it comes to problem-centric sales training for cyber security and insurance, traditional sales training methods and companies fall flat. They borrow a few terms like pain, problem, discovery, impact or...
The Skill of Learning
Today, I want to talk to you about is learning. Just to cut to the chase – not enough time is spent on breaking down the skill of learning. Yes, learning is a skill. If you think learning happens...
Salespeople: Don’t Be the Customer’s Bitch
You are not the customer’s bitch. You are a great sales person. A great sales person isn’t a go-fer, they are keenly in-tune to a customer’s problems and how to solve them. A great...
Hiring “A” Players: 4 Misleading Characteristics to Look Out For
Hiring “A” players is without a doubt a critical element in building and maintaining successful sales teams. We all want the absolute best talent we can get. However, in the end, our job when...
Gap Selling Testimonial: Delivering BIG Results with Gap Selling
I love the success stories I get from people who’ve read Gap Selling. It’s a blast to read when people share their own personal success stories about how Gap Selling has changed their career,...
Gap Selling vs Sandler Sales Training
All Sales Training Is the Same, Right? You’ve experienced it. It’s the same old tired approaches to the same old sales challenges, with each company attempting to add their own little...
A Note to Sales Leadership- Leading from the Bottom Up
As a person in sales leadership, do you have the guts to lead from the bottom up? Does your sales team feel safe coming to you with product problems, market concerns, and competitive challenges? Do you...
Continuing the Gap Selling Journey- My Favorite Non-Sales Book
Continuing Your Gap Selling Journey with Execution In celebration of over 50,000 copies of Gap Selling sold, I wanted to take a moment and highlight other books that influenced my perception or help expand on...
Gap Selling in Practice: Technical Problems Vs. Business Problems – Don’t Fall Into This Trap
Gap Selling is hard. Like really hard. But when you do it right, it’s extremely powerful. I hear all the time “It’s easy to understand the concepts, but hard to master.” But that’s kind of...
Engage During Prospecting- “Why Should I Talk to You?”
Why should I talk to you? Before any sale can begin, the target of your efforts has to talk to you. They have to engage. Enter prospecting. I know, this is the most remedial concept in theory, but in practice,...
![The Element of Intrigue [How to Avoid Being Just Another Salesperson]](https://salesgrowth.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-Element-of-Intrigue-How-to-Avoid-Being-Just-Another-Salesperson-265x150.jpg)
The Element of Intrigue [How to Avoid Being Just Another Salesperson]
Do You Ever Feel Like You’re Just Another Salesperson? Looking around at the state of the sales industry today, I get the sense that everyone’s methods are exactly the same. I think too many sales...
Prospect on LinkedIn Without Being a Pesky Salesperson
LinkedIn is a great tool for selling and prospecting, but most salespeople are using it wrong. They’re treating it it’s a phone call or an email and spamming people. We’ve all gotten them...
Why The Perfect Sales Demo Never Includes the Word “If”
Do you want a telltale sign that your sales demos aren’t very good? Listen to how many times you say “if.” Every time you say “if”, add 10 points. If you collect 20 or more...
Sales Tools: The 9 Things Terribly Wrong With Sales Today
Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: The Bro Culture Lack of Coaching Too Product-Centric and Not Problem Centric Not enough salespeople understand the game/rules of sales Too much reliance on sales tools....
CRMs: Why Salespeople Can’t Be Good If They Don’t Use It
The Sales world is desperate for an upgrade. We’ve been holding on to way too many outmoded approaches, ideas, tropes, and concepts. It’s time sales let’s go of the tired and ineffective belief systems...
Can Quiet Sellers Gap Sell?
A Sales Guy is the leading 21st Century Sales Management Consulting Company....
End of Average: Average Value is No Value
As Gap Selling has crossed the milestone of 50,000 copies sold, we are highlighting some of our favorite books to compliment your Gap Selling journey. Today’s book highlight goes to The End of...
The 4 Types Of Discovery Questions To Crush Your Meetings
Too many salespeople fail at sales discovery meetings. A sales discovery meeting is by far the most important part of a sales process. There is no more important element to selling than the discovery process....
The Difference Between Gap Selling and Solution Selling
Gap Selling has been out for over a year now and one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “how is Gap Selling different than Solution Selling?” Understanding how often I get this request, I...
Stop The Product-Centric Selling: This Simple Sales Tip Will Change Everything You’ve Known About Selling
Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: The Bro Culture Lack of Coaching Too Product-Centric and Not Problem Centric Not enough salespeople understand the game/rules of sales Too much reliance on selling tools....
Lucidchart and Gap Selling – Boom!
Lucidchart and A Sales Growth Company teamed up to help layout the Gap Selling process and make it easier to leverage with your sales team. Using Lucidchart’s amazing tool, it’ even easier to...
Salespeople: The 9 Things Terribly Wrong With Sales Today
Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: The Bro Culture Lack of Coaching Too Product-Centric and Not Problem Centric Not enough salespeople understand the game/rules of sales Too much reliance on selling tools....
Product-Centric Selling: 9 Things Terribly Wrong With Sales Today
Selling today and for the majority of the history of sales has been product-centric. In other words, the sales process, our sales conversations, our sales engagement has been focused on the product and what...
Lack of Sales Coaching: 9 Things Terribly Wrong With Sales Today
Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: Bro Culture Lack of Sales Coaching Product-Centric Selling Not enough salespeople understand the game/rules of sales Too much reliance on selling tools. Not enough...
Sales Bro Culture: 9 Things Terribly Wrong With Sales Today
Sales is suffering from 9 brutal ills: The Sales Bro Culture Lack of Coaching Too Product-Centric and Not Problem Centric Not enough salespeople understand the game/rules of sales Too much reliance on selling...
Problem-Centric Selling vs Product-Centric Selling: It’s Time We Change the Way We Sell
Stop being focused on your product (product-centric) and start focusing on solving your customer’s problems (problem-centric). For years, I mean for most of modern-day sales, we have been...
Problem-Centric Selling – Why No One Gives a Shit About You Or Your Company
You don’t need to be liked to sell. You don’t need to be liked to have credibility. Watch this talk from INBOUND 2018 and learn why you need to be Problem-Centric Selling now. Put yourself in the buyer...
There are ONLY 4 Levers Sales Can Pull to Grow Revenue
It’s not uncommon for revenue to slide. It happens to all sales organizations at one time or another. Revenue being down isn’t the most difficult problem. Knowing why revenue is down and where to...