Episode Library

Senior sales leadership (and Wall Street analysts) talk a lot about strategic accounts. Of course, that’s where the money is, and more importantly that’s where the profit is. While your top tier of customers may generate 60 or 80% of your revenue, they will generate all of your company’s profits. Strategic accounts spend more, they are customers longer, and make specific long-lasting platform, technology and relationship commitments. But it takes work. You need expertise, process excellence and ...

While most people think of opportunity reviews as a necessary evil to build pipeline visibility, effective opportunity review sessions serve as a critical planning process to ensure timely deal closings. Yes…a planning process. Good opportunity reviews identify unknown unknowns and action plans that dramatically boost close rates. And a good platform for capturing those relationship maps and action plan tasks helps to ensure good organization and effective follow through. I mention ARPEDIO as a ...

I've been deeply involved in account planning process development, improvement and facilitation for many years and have seen the strong positive impact on value creation, customer satisfaction and loyalty and revenue. Here are a few lessons learned along the way: Account planning, as the basis for account based selling, is vastly different from writing an account plan Effective preparation helps to ensure the success of an individual account planning initiative Good account planning requires the...

Special guest Jonathan Levitt answers the question “why do we choose to do hard things?”, like running an ultramarathon or selling corporate wellness services (blood analytics) to government agencies. As the top sales person at InsideTracker , a blood analytics company, Jonathan moved from ambassador program management, influencer development and direct-to-consumer sales to a focus on enterprise and public sector. Along the way he’s worked with leading professional and elite athletes, and more r...

Join me for a discussion in how to study, measure and improve sales productivity. Sales productivity is the intersection of sales effectiveness, efficiency and revenue, and is the backbone of a growing and profitable organization. Here are some highlights: Sales enablement is one of the five levers of sales productivity and is the glue that sticks all of the others together. While content is a component of sales enablement, enablement is much more. And while training is a component of sales enab...

Episode Summary Is your CRM just a graveyard for contact info? In this episode of Thoughts on Selling , Lee Levitt sits down with Ulrik Monberg , CEO of ARPEDIO , to solve a problem plaguing sales teams: Why do "Account Plans" end up as static documents stuck in a drawer? Ulrik identified that most tools store data but fail to guide behavior. He built ARPEDIO to bridge this gap. We discuss the shift from Account Planning (a document) to Account-Based Selling (ABS) (a process) and how the Strateg...

Special guest ⁠ Laurie Schloff and I discuss the value of effective communication in the selling realm. This episode will help you to become a better communicator, and to help your team communicate better as well! Good communicators are able to motivate their prospects more effectively than weak communicators, and most of selling involves helping others to see different ways of being, to lower the perception of risk in acting, and to show a useful path forward. Laurie shares some tips regarding ...

Special guest ⁠ Jackie Quint and I discuss the value of customer success as a key to revenue generation and why smart AEs partner with CSMs to win more deals and help customers achieve their strategic goals! Too much of selling focuses on the hero's journey of bringing in new logos and undervalues the shorter-cycle, lower-cost, higher-win-rate sale to existing customers. Jackie, with her experience in carrying a bag, consulting with multiple companies and then running Sales Enablement, Operation...

Special guest ⁠Christine McKay and I discuss how to get the most from a sales engagement, starting with a value selling mindset — understanding requirements, aligning with the customer’s business goals and demonstrating value. Christine, as an experienced sales negotiator, outlines how most organizations leave value on the table and assume additional costs in virtually every deal. While sales people tend to focus on price as a primary contract term, most customers care more about implementation...

Special guest ⁠ Kevin Dixon ⁠ and I discuss a key factor in value selling — understanding the participants on the buying team, mapping the relationships and dynamics and coming up with a plan to address their individual and group care-abouts. Kevin is a long term sales exec turned company founder, who has brought a powerful tool to the market. Boxxstep provides the capability to map relationships, share that information cross the sales team and to poll individual buyers post engagement to determ...