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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Want a viable future? Opportunities abound in the Common Good

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Case study, Common Ground, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values, Innovation, Opportunity, Optimism, Selling Better, Sustainability & Environment

What type of board member, CEO or sales leader are you?

  • Are you stuck in the day-to-day looking to meet your monthly and quarterly targets, looking to maximise profit, shareholder return and your bonuses?
    OR
  • Are you looking into the future to see what lies ahead ensuring there is a viable sustainable path for all to follow and participate in?

    • In today’s world everything is up for grabs.

    Old institutions are crashing and dying because they held onto the past and failed to adapt.

    Take Thomas Cook Travel as a current case in point. While their leaders were bathing themselves in 29M pounds of bonuses, …

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    How should I assess a sales recruit?

    By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Call Reluctance, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Talent

    Last time I wrote about what we should be looking for in a good sales recruit.

    This time we will look at how we go about assessing a sales recruit.

    There are a myriad of ways you can assess someone – some are legitimate and purpose built for sales recruitment while other methods wouldn’t stand up in a court of law even if they work for you. 

    Let’s take intuition or gut feel for instance.

    There is nothing wrong with using your gut feelings or intuition; however, using it as your only source of assessment criteria will make it hard …

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    What should I be looking for in a good sales recruit?

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Role Clarity, Sales Skills, Sales Talent

    What should I be looking for in a good sales recruit?

    This is a vexing question for many sales and business leaders.

    And some of the answers we still hear aren’t very helpful either.

    ‘They must be hunters.’

    ‘They need to be hungry.’

    ‘They’ve got to be able to close deals.’

    ‘They must have a mortgage and family so they are ‘motivated’ to sell more.’

    ‘They must have industry experience.’

    Notice anything familiar about most of these answers?

    They are all stuck in the ‘aggressive, self-serving, desperate approach to selling’ paradigm which is not what good selling actually is …

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    Sales – the new team sport

    By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Role Clarity, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Results, Sales Trends

    Sales trend 9 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019 explores the characteristics and benefits of truly integrated sales teams.

    The future of the individual ‘solo’ salesperson is coming to an end for most businesses.

    What is taking their place is an integrated team of people working on sales together.

    Sales leaders do not need teams of individual B2B salespeople, they need people with a diverse range of skills working as integrated teams across a range of sales disciplines and capabilities.

    Teams who can cover areas such as sales and territory planning, account development, CRM & sales pipeline …

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    Why Progress, NOT Perfection, helps us find Common Ground for the Common Good

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Common Ground, Communication, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values

    “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Voltaire

    “The world is becoming very black and white with people striving for perfection where only the best is acceptable. If we continue down this road, then we will lose everything that is human.” Madeline Stuart*

    “Perfection is the enemy of progress.” Winston Churchill

    Our relationship with perfection and progress can be rather fraught.

    In the human world that often promotes perfection or the idealised state, i.e.

    The perfect body

    The perfect marriage/relationship

    The perfect career

    The perfect mind

    The perfect way to be sustainable, and so on…

    We can …

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    Trusting optimism

    By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Opportunity, Optimism, Wellbeing

    Sales trend 8 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019 is about the benefits for people and businesses of adopting an optimistic approach.

    By guest author Victor Perton.

    It is said that trust is in short supply in Australia. The Edelman Trust Barometer is trotted out in pessimistic speeches to suggest that Australian leadership is in a state of collapse. However, the Edelman folk are confused by their own findings. Given the current prosperity and wellbeing in Australia, with 25 years of uninterrupted growth, a presentation by Edelman suggested that the place in which Brand …

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    How prepared is ‘The Lucky Country’ for tough times?

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Collaboration, Ethics & Values, Innovation, Opportunity, Sales Strategy, Selling Better, Strategy, Success, Uncategorized

    Ah the good times…

    Ah 28 years of uninterrupted growth…

    Ah Australia, ‘The Lucky Country’*…

    Ah ‘How good is Australia?’…

    Pssst. But don’t talk about the R** word…

    We are indeed fortunate in Australia to have access to many resources, space, and talented people; however, our luck maybe running out if we carry on drinking the ‘recession avoidance’ Kool Aid, carry on with our old ways of managing business and thinking everything is rosy instead of adapting to the array of changes, challenges, and opportunities that are out there in the market place.

    Which is why I couldn’t go past economist Jim Stanford’s comments in Paddy …

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