Sales Channels – options aplenty, but what’s the right choice for your firm?

There are really two times that it is appropriate to make a decision about what channel(s) to use for your selling efforts:  1) before you launch your training/consulting firms, and 2) every day that ends in ‘y’ after your company is open for business! Of course your ‘switching costs’ will rise in terms of changing [...]

Big Animal Pictures

Over the last few months I have been having more conversations with small training firms as well as people thinking about hanging out a shingle as a sales trainer.  In addition to talking about key issues like their Exit Strategy I have, almost without fail, brought up the challenge of how they talk about what [...]

Seeing my name in lights

Many thanks to Dave Stein for his kind words and taking up so much space in his blog with this interview of me. If you aren’t a subscriber to Dave’s blog you can do that here.  Dave is the only analyst solely focusing on the sales training space and posts content that is of interest [...]

Moving to Virtual Instructor Led Training

And now for something completely different1 … instead of passing along my own bright ideas I thought I would show that I live my life as suggested by a former boss – surrounded by people smarter than me.  One of those smart peeps is Ian Savage, a consultant who has reinvented himself as the master [...]

Unwinnable Deals – A big problem especially during a recession

One of the roles I occasionally play for training and consulting firms that I am working with is one of Thought Leadership.   In January 2007 this article I wrote was published under my name and that of a salesperson for Applied Concepts Institute in a now defunct Rochester, NY magazine called Business Strategies. Reading the [...]

Opportunity Assessment Approaches

Over the years there have been a number of consulting and training firms who have provided ways of assessing opportunities.  For the benefit of my readers who don’t have an Opportunity Assessment approach in their methodology I pass these along and encourage you to have a standard Opportunity Assessment process for use by your salespeople [...]