how-do-you-solve-a-sales-problem-you-cannot-name

How Do You Solve a Sales Problem You Can’t Name?

By / / AI & Data, Sales Consulting, Sales Leadership, Sales Strategy, Sales System

In 30 seconds

The Problem: More leaders are taking vague but real business problems to AI: a pipeline that keeps getting longer, numbers that haven’t moved in years. AI answers the words it’s given, so a vague description gets generic advice.

The Shift: The symptom is rarely the problem. A long pipeline can have several very different causes, and each needs a completely different fix.

The Solution: Diagnose before you prescribe. Find the real cause before you build the plan. Barrett can help.

How Do You Solve a Sales Problem You Can’t Name? Read Post »

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Part 2: Coaching to the sales system: what it takes, and where it stops.

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Growth, Sales Process Maps

In 30 seconds

The Problem: A sales system makes sales coaching easier, but not automatic. Leaders asked to coach to a process they don’t yet understand will struggle. A poor process embeds the wrong behaviour, and no system reliably fixes a motivation problem.

The Shift: Coaching to a system works when the structure comes first, the system stays sound, and coaches can tell a skill gap from a will gap by asking one question: if their job depended on it, could this person do it?

The Solution: Walk leaders through the sales process and its logic before they coach to it. Keep the process current against real deal outcomes, and handle will problems with the right conversation. Then build the coaching capability to work with it.

Part 2: Coaching to the sales system: what it takes, and where it stops. Read Post »

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Part 1: You don’t need to be a great sales coach. You need something to coach to.

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Leadership, Sales Coaching, Sales Growth, Sales performance, Sales Process Maps

In 30 seconds

The Problem: When sales results disappoint, organisations invest in turning sales managers into better sales coaches. But most managers were promoted for selling, not for developing others. Exceptional coaching talent is rare, and it can’t be scaled across a team.

The Shift: The leverage isn’t in coaching skill. It’s in what the sales coaching is anchored to. Like checklists in aviation and surgery, a sales system makes ordinary practitioners reliably good.

The Solution: Give managers a clear sales process, agreed tools, consistent messaging and a common methodology. Sales coaching then becomes a shared conversation about the gap between the process and reality, not a matter of personal opinion.

Part 1: You don’t need to be a great sales coach. You need something to coach to. Read Post »

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The below-cost trap: how to hold your price when a competitor won’t hold theirs

By / / Buying, Competition, Negotiation, Value Based Selling

In 30 seconds

The Problem: When costs spike, a competitor often cuts price below what it costs to deliver, betting anxious customers will follow the lowest number. Sellers holding a sustainable price feel they’re losing before the conversation starts.

The Shift: They’re not. The response isn’t matching the price, it is asking better questions, acknowledging the customer’s margin pressure, and understanding what they’re weighing beyond the invoice.

The Solution: Build the total cost picture, reliability, service, switching cost, in real numbers, not adjectives. Look for genuine ways to lower the customer’s actual costs. If a discount is unavoidable, trade it for something in return.

The below-cost trap: how to hold your price when a competitor won’t hold theirs Read Post »

you-have-paid-for-the-crm-are-you-getting-the-roi

You’ve Paid for the CRM. Are You Getting the ROI?

By / / CRM, Sales Coaching, Sales Process Maps

In 30 seconds

The Problem: CRM failure rates have sat between 47 and 55 percent for two decades. The cause is rarely the software itself.

The Shift: Move from instinct-led “hero seller” selling, fragile and unscalable, to a mapped sales process with telemetry across every stage, the same discipline that gives F1 teams their edge.

The Solution: Barrett maps your sales process into a steering instrument for coaching and alignment, captured in a sales playbook fully integrated with your CRM and AI stack, built from whatever you already have in place, not started from scratch.

You’ve Paid for the CRM. Are You Getting the ROI? Read Post »

asking-ai-for-top-sales-trainers-gets-you-the-wrong-answer

The Buyer’s Trap: Why Asking AI for “Top Sales Trainers” Gets You the Wrong Answer

By / / Business Acumen, Learning and Development, Sales Research, Sales Training

In 30 seconds

The Problem: Asking AI for “top sales trainers” returns a popularity leaderboard, fame and visibility ranked as if they were evidence of results. This happens because product-category questions can only ever surface product-category data.

The Shift: The fix is not a smarter AI, it is a better-framed question. Buyers who describe the actual business outcome they need, and the real capability gap underneath it, get fundamentally different, more useful search results than buyers who search for the product itself.

The Solution: A real example: a brief describing a scaling investment firm’s need to build listening and questioning skills across a technically strong team, framed around business outcome rather than “sales training,” surfaced an entirely different, more relevant shortlist. Discernment in the question produces discernment in the answer.

The Buyer’s Trap: Why Asking AI for “Top Sales Trainers” Gets You the Wrong Answer Read Post »

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The Four Commercial Mistakes Mission-Led Organisations Keep Making

By / / Brand & Reputation, Business Growth, Sales Strategy, Value Proposition & Value Add

In 30 seconds

The Problem: Mission-led organisations often mistake public attention for a go-to-market strategy, repeating the same mistakes of undifferentiated messaging, campaign dependency, and sequencing branding before strategy.

The Shift: Commercial growth is not automatically good for a mission, it must be designed deliberately to strengthen rather than dilute it.

The Solution: Segment stakeholders properly, build differentiated messaging for each, and grow the commercial system with mission preservation built in from the start.

The Four Commercial Mistakes Mission-Led Organisations Keep Making Read Post »

engage-communicate-and-sell-better

Engage, Communicate, Sell Better: What Each Generation Brings To The Table

By / / AI & Data, Business Growth, Entrepreneurship, Life Skills, Sales Strategy, Value Proposition & Value Add

In 30 seconds

The Problem: Organisations often treat generational difference as a gap to manage rather than a resource to draw on, leaving experience and digital fluency siloed instead of combined.

The Shift: Knowledge is no longer gated by age or seniority, so the real advantage now lies in judgement, knowing what to do with information everyone can access, built through genuine two-way learning across generations.

The Solution: Create environments where younger digital fluency and experienced pattern recognition are exchanged in both directions, so engage, communicate and sell better works across the whole table, not just the senior end of it..

Engage, Communicate, Sell Better: What Each Generation Brings To The Table Read Post »

responsible-selling-is-now-required

Responsible Selling Was Always Right. Now It’s Required

By / / Ethics & Values, Human-centred, Sales Culture, Selling Better

In 30 seconds

Problem: Telcos face a fundamental shift as ACMA scraps industry self-regulation for a mandatory, directly enforceable standard, driven by high-pressure sales tactics and consumers sold plans they cannot afford.

The Shift: Penalties now reach $10 million or 30 per cent of turnover, with registration and deregistration powers attached. Responsible selling moves from aspiration to legal requirement.

The Solution: Organisations that already practise human-centred, ethical selling gain a structural head start. Responsible selling was always right. Now it is required, and the gap between the two has just become very expensive to ignore.

Responsible Selling Was Always Right. Now It’s Required Read Post »

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