a good example of why you should discuss budgets early on

So, you know how I mentioned how it creates a massive, uphill battle if you ask about budgets upfront on an initial call? Well, it’s even worse if you completely avoid it altogether. Long story short, my wife and I recently had a pool built. It’s awesome! We went through the purchasing process with four […]

The First :28 Seconds – Modern (and primitive) Revenue Operations

Here’s the business problem that all this helps to solve: for a lot of organizations, marketing generates leads, passes them to sales, and for a lot of them, no one really knows what happens. Some of them will go on to purchase, yes, but for a rather large percentage of them, no one really knows […]

The Ever-present Struggle to Balance Logic & Emotion

You know what? I wasn’t going to write about this, but we’re nearing the end AND I mentioned that I play in a bar band, so … I’m going to share this because this is yet another piece of my personal experience that has helped to influence my way of thinking on all of this. […]

The P.L.A.T.E. Framework for Initial Interactions

“I don’t know … I just have this, certain way of speaking … that … gets people to … take me seriously …” I remember explaining this to my VP when I was first starting out here, and really, I’ll admit: I’ve never been a manager or a trainer or anything like that prior to […]

Pre-sale Relationship Plinko

There are a few other characteristics that I’d like to highlight from my experience there, and again, it really has nothing do with the specifics of that university in particular. It was a very large organization, with thousands of employees, and the division I belonged to, the military division, was really a fraction of the […]

The P.L.A.T.E. Framework for Initial Interactions

The CONCLUSION Part II

It was very poor experience and they had absolutely no control on those calls. They’d get immediately put on the ropes during those calls and I’d hear them trying to diagnose issues and give specific recommendations two minutes in on the relationship, or they’d try to either answer or dodge questions by saying something like: […]

The CONCLUSION Part I

Here’s the long and short of it: people make major purchasing decisions based on emotion and then they try to justify it afterwards with logic. We’ve all heard this before, and we all know it’s true – this is no secret. I know I covered a ton of information throughout all of this, so if […]

There’s Nonverbal Communication even in our Verbal Communication

So when you think of non-verbal communication, the first thing that probably jumps to mind is body language. And I think it’s probably a normal assumption to think that stuff like body language, and facial expressions, and certain physiological triggers (like talking with your hands) don’t really matter when doing business over the phones because […]

Experts vs. Novices & the Science Behind First Impressions

I have a theory that reasonable, mature adults will gladly pay a little more (within reason, of course) for quality products and service. By default, people will go with the cheapest option when they: need help with something that they can’t figure out on their own, and everyone they spoke with pretty much sucked at […]