How Buyer Acumen Cascades to Support Sales Enablement
Would you build a house on a foundation of mud and straw? Of course not. Yet that’s precisely what many organizations do when they shortchange Buyer Acumen—the deep, intentional understanding of your buyers that buyer-centric selling depends on—and proceed directly to building out their sales enablement programs, content libraries, training curricula, and messaging frameworks. The […]
Continue readingWhy Most Sales Managers Still Fail at Coaching and the System That Fixes It
In today’s post, we’ll explore why most sales managers still struggle to deliver consistent, effective coaching that actually moves the needle on performance and why a complete coaching system is the missing piece that turns good intentions into repeatable results. Introduction If you lead a sales team or support one, you’ve likely seen this story […]
Continue readingThe Time-to-Value Fallacy: Why Adoption Beats Speed
Executive Summary Sales leaders often chase fast sales training implementations to hit time-to-value targets. The problem? Research shows short programs rarely drive adoption or mastery—especially for a full methodology. Extended, science-backed sales training using bite-sized learning, spaced repetition, retrieval learning and practice, and weekly manager support (including coaching) delivers far higher adoption. Over 75% adoption […]
Continue readingHuman Differentiators: A Powerful & Sustainable Competitive Advantage
CEOs, Sales Leaders, and Enablement Professionals of all flavors: Today, I want to talk about that thing we’ve said for years is our competitive advantage, but on which we rarely walk our talk. Yes, I’m referring to our people, our talent, and for us, specifically—our sales force. “Our people are our competitive advantage.” – Said […]
Continue readingStraight Talk About What Holds Companies Back from Getting Better Sales Results
CEOs, Sales Leaders, and Enablement Professionals: Today, I want to talk about something that may be a bit uncomfortable and may even upset some of you. But the title of this article includes “Straight Talk” so I’m going on the record about things I see that hold companies back from getting better sales results. Buckle […]
Continue readingHow to Radically Improve Your B2B Sales Win Rates
In this post, I’m going to share some simple concepts that I’ve seen deliver radically improved results across a sales force. And by “radically,” I mean improve opportunity management effectiveness and skyrocket win rates by 25-40%. I’ve been part of delivering these results, multiple times in my career, for both employers and clients. It’s entirely […]
Continue readingHow Sales Enablement & Sales Managers Can Partner to Drive Results
There’s still a lot of talk these days in the sales enablement community and the market at large about the need for sales and marketing alignment. I wish I saw more of it actually happening, but the concept is out there and there are examples of what good looks like. When it happens, the results […]
Continue readingHow to Resize and Retool Your Sales Force
This is a post I never wanted to write. I originally posted it as a LinkedIn Article in August of 2020 and unfortunately, find it relevant again already in mid-2022. At the time I published it initially, I had hoped the worst of the pandemic-fueled layoffs were behind us. Unfortunately, many company executives still needed […]
Continue readingThe Sliding Scale of Sales Transformation
Sales Transformation. It’s a term that means different things to different people. I’ve been involved in sales transformations that were entirely focused on getting the best-possible performance out of the sales force (ranging from a 30 to 600 percent increase in sales), independent of retooling the rest of the organization. In my experience, the potential […]
Continue readingWhat’s Your Strategy for Sales Talent Development? Part 2
In the first post in this series, I defined Learning, Training, Development, and Education. Learning: Learning is the act of acquiring new knowledge and skills. Training: Training is job-related learning about what, why, and how (and maybe when and where) to do something (or multiple things), to be successful in a specific role. Development: Development […]
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