Think of your client as a cat. If the string is sitting still on the table, they won’t care at all, but as soon as the string starts to move, they will want to pounce on it. Human brains are interested in things that change and move, as well as things that need to be figured out. Both of those can be used to your advantage.

Organizations and revenue leaders need to put sellers in a position where they do not need any of their prospects or clients. You, as a leader, need to put your sellers in a position where they have so many leads and such a big pipeline that they are overwhelmed and they naturally start to act as if they don’t care about any one deal more than the others. And, you need to do it now.

We need more flexible organizational structures that are focused more on function and less on horizontal alignment. We need more decentralized power and a focus on integration of people and tools in the organizational structure. And, we need to reinvent the middle operational layer of talent in a way that allows us to hire and train the right people to interface with tools so that we can empower all of our people and tools across the org to specialize in what they do best.

What does the fact that customers know everything, and can switch easily, mean for selling organizations?

Understanding what drives and motivates your buyer as a human being separate from their organization can help you identify and speak to the right set of incentives, but even if you don’t fully understand your buyer, simply thinking about things from your buyers perspective will help you resonate more with them.

You have the ability to frame your solution against any background and any other solutions that you choose to, and if you miss an opportunity to do this correctly, you can put yourself in a tough situation when it comes to aligning your offering with the clients priorities.

The more the buyer talks about their problems, and their desired outcomes, the more likely they are to get frustrated, angry, hopeful, or excited, and all are good.

It is very likely that over time, as it becomes increasingly easier to execute on functions and outputs that differentiate businesses today, it will end up being the things that businesses cannot do today, that new technology will eventually allow them to do, that will be competed on most fiercely down the road.

Once we understand that incremental sales get harder, we can begin to wrap our minds around the concept that as costs increase, the margins decrease and that will mean that the only way to fundamentally improve margins over the long run is to set up process and operational systems that allow for fewer people, and fewer highly paid people to drive more business and work with more accounts.

This means that sellers will spend their time working with the easiest clients to sell to. By definition, this means that every single incremental sale is harder than the one before it.

There is a fundamental barrier preventing revolutionary results and that is the lack of compatibility between AI and the human ability to leverage that output.

Sales presentations really can be like art. Sure, it’s nerdy, somewhat boring, and definitely not culturally relevant art, but art, nonetheless. Buyers have to be emotionally engaged in the story, and then will find intellectual justification for their excitement and decisions.

As sellers, we want to be talking about problems and desired outcomes, and skip over the conversation about solutions.

The path between problem and solution is paved by facts and information, while the path between the status quo and the desired outcome is paved by human obstacles, the fear of not overcoming those obstacles, and the hope of ending up in a better reality.

The trick is to remember that the presentation is not the slides. The story that you tell is the presentation, and the slides are just one iteration in aiding that presentation.

They want to be able to tell everyone at the buying organization about the cool new thing they are doing without assuming any of the risk of doing a cool new thing.

If you are perceived to be giving off the message that you are good at everything and a good fit for everyone, you immediately lose credibility.

Telling someone you are an expert makes it more likely that they will listen to you. This is so straightforward that it almost feels like it is not worth mentioning. But so many people don’t take advantage of the device, that it certainly is worth discussing.

The success of your unscheduled client call, or cold call is highly dependent on the first 20 words that come out of your mouth.

You are NOT selling your product yet. You are establishing credibility, understanding and validating the problem, learning about the desired outcome, and gaining momentum by gathering your first set of agreements from the prospect so that you can move on to more.