Learning new skills takes practice. Practice in low-pressure situations.Â
Trying to learn under pressure is a recipe for fear, panic, and sloppy execution. Then comes the wrong conclusion: the skill doesn’t work.
(Sorry, another sports analogy coming...)
Imagine never bunting before, then stepping ...
I tried to write this as one article. It wasn’t working.
So this is two parts. Please read both.
The second shows how AI is accelerating a trend I’ve pushed against my entire career.
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Part 1: Stop Lying to Get the First Touch
Sales has always had a habit of inventing shortcuts.
They’re rarely...
An SDR team moved to AI-driven research. Companies found. Buyers identified.
Clean bullets pushed into HubSpot and on to the dialer.
Data popped up the second a prospect answered.
Looked perfect. I loved it.
Then conversation:meeting conversion dropped.
I was puzzled. So I talked to the reps.
...
Flashback four years ago:
On a long drive together Peter said,
“Are you ever going to write a book?”
I said,
“I don’t know. If I do, it can’t be boring. I’ve read too many of those.”
We dropped it… and went back to laughing about outrageous sales stories.
A year later, another long drive:
Peter g...
There’s a quiet little lie baked into a lot of sales orgs.
It’s the idea that a rep’s LinkedIn network somehow belongs to the company.
It doesn’t.
It never has.
And it’s embarrassing how aggressively some companies try to weaponize it for prospecting.
Let’s call out what’s really happening.
Lead...
Most companies train reps on the product before they train on the problems.
That’s backward.
When you start with features, reps default to describing what the tool does.
When you start with buyer challenges, they learn how to focus on what's more relevant: problems, aspirations.
If your outbound...
When Peter and I wrote this book, we talked about various differences in sales today.
One question we had:
Do fundamentals still matter in an AI world?
Quickly we realized: yes. More than ever.
Here’s what I see working with teams every day:
- Most teams don’t have the fundamentals nailed
- The ...
In business development, AI (and/or automation) used poorly does three things fast: damages your brand, damages your reputation, and kills your shot at a meeting.
People don’t like being tricked.
We’ve seen this before.
“Re:” in subject lines.
Fake local numbers.
Short-term hacks. Long-term trust k...
I analyze a lot of sales messaging for my clients.
Most kind of sounds the same. Well, structurally.
And it’s not because reps lack effort but because they’re starting in the same place: the product.
Companies focus way to much on the product. What needs focus and definition is the PROBLEM you so...
Coming April 1st: our first book. Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook (for Sales Leaders)
And here’s a peek at the cover.
Back up! how’d this happen?
The process has been, quite frankly, a blast. I think the way we approached this made it more fun than most book projects probably a...
Most companies say they have an Ideal Customer Profile.
What they usually have is a description of companies they’d like to sell to.
That distinction matters.
Because when targeting isn’t clearly defined, or enforced, reps fill in the gaps themselves. They go after accounts that look interesting,...
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