What to do when there’s panic in the air…get focused & get selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Case study, Life Skills, Opportunity, Prospecting, Resilience, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales performance, Sales Results, Sales Tips, Success

I’ve been around long enough to have lived and worked through major recessions, financial crises i.e. GFC, and general downturns in business and survived, if not thrived during these times. Why?

The clever investors, business and salespeople look at downturns in markets as opportunities to get further ahead. They look at the evidence at hand, the trends that are emerging and see opportunity, when many others see disaster. I don’t mean that these people are blithely skipping through the day oblivious to the challenges facing communities, markets and economies.

The truth is they are probably far more aware of all the challenges …

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Fairness in trading terms for SMEs

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Common Ground, Entrepreneurship, Ethics & Values

You know the story ‘small business wins huge deal with large client’. Amazing.

Everyone is celebrating. ‘Biggest deal we’ve ever had. OMG’

So after the win, the small business sends their terms and conditions for signing and the big client comes back with “we can’t sign your payment terms of 14 days, our payment terms are 60 days after the end of the month of invoice”, that is, if you are lucky, because the reality can be  90 days or more. Which is really bad for business, especially small businesses.

But, the small business agrees because ‘it’s such a good opportunity’ not necessarily …

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The Noble Profession of Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Ethics & Values, Opportunity, Sales Essentials, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Research, Self Development, Selling Better, Success

The statement ‘The noble profession of Selling’ may sit well with some. While many others would find ways to say everything to the contrary, bringing up stories about how they or others were ripped off by shonky salespeople. I mean why is it that when someone’s deceived by someone else they say ‘they’ve done a sales job on them’? There’s nothing noble about that, you’d agree.

In a world where it’s too easy to engage and influence people with catchy slogans and memes that can propagate negative stereotypes, fear of the other, division, misinformation and myths, and keep people ignorant or …

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Storytelling for Better Sales & Enriching Relationships

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Call Reluctance, Communication, Ethics & Values, Gratitude, Self Development, Self Promotion, Vision, Mission & Purpose

The truth is we all tell stories every day in a myriad of ways in varieties of situations for a variety of reasons.

In ancient times, oral storytelling was the original way we passed down our knowledge and wisdom to the next generation.  Here in Australia, First Nations people call it The Dreamtime.

Storytelling is inherent in human nature. Storytelling is inherent in sales.

Stories told and aligned to the organisation’s purpose and principles, enrich, transform and sell.

Storytelling like Selling, is ubiquitous. 

How well we tell stories, the right stories at the right time for the right reasons to the right people well that’s a whole other story.

This is what I would like to focus on here, especially as it relates to selling.

But I have to set the scene with you first.

Over 10 years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Sandy McDonald, an author, TEDx speaker, and a clarity and storytelling trainer and coach. I was presenting to a group of people at a public seminar on The Psychology of Call Reluctance and the Fear of Self Promotion. Sandy was in the audience. The reason I remember Sandy so well is that a few days post this session, she sent me a blog she had written about me, my topic and the stories I shared and the positive impact it had on her. This had never happened to me before and I was very moved by her narrative.

We connected on Linkedin, chatted every now and then but it wasn’t until early 2019 that we reconnected again on a much deeper level. You see I had just released my book ‘142 Days of Gratitude that changed my life forever’ and posted a chapter excerpt which explained what prompted me to write the book. Sandy reconnected with me again posting her story about what my story meant to her.

What became clear is that our relationship was being forged on storytelling and that storytelling is at the heart of every human relationship. Which is why we are now working together to help other people develop their craft in storytelling to build meaningful connections and forge better relationships that drive better business and create better outcomes personally and professionally.

I’m a storyteller by default because I have never studied the craft of storytelling like Sandy has. For instance, Sandy’s been working with us to Barrett to help us further develop our stories. She’s been working with us on how we tell the story of our 25 years of evolution at Barr

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Crowdsourcing Sales Forecasting to deliver better certainty

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Forecasting, Innovation, Opportunity, Sales Forecasting, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Selling Better, Success

People love certainty, especially when it comes to business. Which is why sales forecasting and sales pipeline management can often be the bane of sales leaders and their sales teams’ lives with senior management constantly on their backs wanting to know what deals will land and when, and when the revenue will start to come in. It’s relentless.

So given the current state of the world and the climate of uncertainty, it’s a good time to look at some of the latest thinking and work being done to improve the certainty of sales forecasting and pipeline management.

Current Situation with Sales Forecasting

Tracking …

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Why we prioritise Virtues over Values in our work at Barrett

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Ethics & Values, Gratitude, Life Skills, Optimism

As a consulting and education firm, we go into many organisations and they inevitably have a set of values i.e. integrity, honesty, passion, customer centric/obsessed, courage, and so on.

That’s nice on one level, but how are these values practised every day? How are they demonstrated and enacted?

This is usually the missing piece, which is why my preference is to be virtues driven rather than values driven.

Values and virtues are often seen as synonymous, however, they are quite different.

Simply put, values are goals or ideals or even opinions.

Virtues are behaviours showing high moral standards. Virtues are how we practice and demonstrate …

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Selling deception & enabling criminals – how we’ve hit a new low

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Ethics & Values, Sales Culture

I’m so furious, but sadly not surprised at all, with the news this week about the unethical, shameful and, frankly, criminal actions of companies such as Westpac and NAB. They are not alone, far from it, but they stand out as current heinous examples of the deception, greed and corruption emanating from the highest levels of business and its devastating impact on people.

Someone asked me the other day if this was the fault of the salespeople who sold the junk insurance or billed dead people, or the fault of compliance teams that ignored 23 million illegal transactions. Yes, they are …

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Building trust through personal image

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Life Skills, Presentation & Grooming, Sales Presentation & Grooming, Sales Trends, Trust

In Sales Trend 11 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019, guest author Leadership Stylist Helen Robinett discusses how our personal image can help build trust.

By guest author Helen Robinett.

Trust in business has never been more crucial than what it is right now.

People do business with people they like and trust. Full stop. No-one does business with an ‘organisation’.

Human beings are highly visual and it takes an instant to create a first impression. Gone are the days when it took 7 seconds to form a first impression. If I walk to the front of …

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Gratitude and Materialism

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Buying, Common Ground, Emotional Intelligence, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values, Gratitude, Life Skills, Sustainability & Environment

Practising gratitude has made me focus on other matters and much less on material things. I have found that I am far less worried about ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or experiencing FOMO (fear of missing out). I think less about things and more about people.

There is a place for materialism in our world. I appreciate nice things. I am not an ascetic who disavows material goods or worldly possessions. But I don’t feel the need to strive for them madly. I also understand and appreciate how materialism works as a driver for so much of …

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The Holy Trinity of Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Buying, Collaboration, Common Ground, Communication, Ethics & Values, Opportunity, Sales Skills, Sales Talent, Solution Selling

This post has been inspired by my colleague, Ben Shute, who I work arm in arm with bridging the divide between sales and procurement. He wrote about the Holy Trinity of Procurement Skills and so challenged me to do the same for Sales.

Here is my contribution.

The profession of selling requires a whole range of capabilities. It’s hard to know where to begin to define the 3 core elements for sales – the Holy Trinity of Selling.

So I’ll start with the master categories of Knowledge, Skills and Mindset from Barrett’s Sales Competency Dictionary.

Knowledge

Let’s …

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