Episode Library

Nancy Maluso, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Edgio and I take a deep dive into the power of curiosity and authenticity in the customer engagement process, and the practices of value selling to ensure positive outcomes for all. Nancy and I cover the practices that allow a good sales person to drive great results. Key takeaways: - High performing sales people don’t provide information about products. Instead, they provide insight into how a company’s business can be changed by change in p...

Jonathan Mahon, cofounder of The Practice Lab and I take a deep dive into the value of discovery in the sales process, and the application of “deliberate practice” to improve selling skills. While some believe that discovery “belongs” in a discrete stage of the sales process, and is sometimes delegated to a presales engineer, Jonathan and I share a different perspective. Discovery should start long before the first contact, with the sales person and presales engineer conducting background resear...

Special guest Mark Goloboy brings an extensive background in both large and small companies driving demand using data, analytics, process improvement and elbow grease. Together we nerd out on the value of data and shared goals to help drive pipeline size and shape. We also dig into the processes that help to ensure success. Some companies play the blame game ( it’s your fault, no yours!) while others focus on the goals of driving revenue and customer value. This latter focus requires both good d...

The purpose of a sales enablement charter is to define sales enablement, the sales enablement group mission, its focus, how it measures success, the key stakeholders and internal customers. It sets the boundaries of what the group will do and importantly, what the group will not or should not do. The charter is a tool to help communicate what others should and should not expect from the sales enablement team. High performing teams include the following critical components in their sales enableme...

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...