Photo:GM Everyone knows Santa Claus-- red suit, long white beard, familiar belly laugh and long-time leader of all things North Pole.   For some strange reason, most don’t have a clue as to the early days of his career.     So let me break it to you, Santa got his start in sales.   A long time ago, hundreds of Christmases before occupying the big chair in the corner office up at the North Pole, Santa worked on the selling side of North Pole Distributing. Like many hardworking sales types with hundreds of years under his belt, Santa leveraged all the lessons learned out in a territory to move up in his organization.  Playing a front and center role in a global distribution organization with customers around the globe, Mr. Claus puts those lessons to work almost every day.  It’s difficult for a lowly industry consultant to get an audience with big time executives, but last week I leveraged over six decades worth of being on the “nice list” to gra...

Let’s start with two assumptions. First, your company sells solutions, not a hodge-podge pile of parts. Second, some of th e products you sell fit together nicely to solve customer issues. Some reasoning has been applied to the building of your product offering. As you set out to create solutions, you started assembling the right parts and pieces to address customer issues. But I have a question. Are your customers connecting all the dots? Most of us assume our customers realize how all the stuff in those gigantic catalogs fit together. Experienced customers probably rely on you to carefully select just the right products for their particular applications and offer them up in a solution format. A few might bring you into the equation by sharing business concerns and problems before they have fully analyzed the whole situation. Newer, and even some existing, customers are different. They may not fully understand your brand of solution selling. Some may not yet trust yo...

Are your salespeople headed to a knife fight with fingernail clippers? photo: jokeoverflow I travel for a living.  Delta Airlines loves me.  Over the course of the last decade of travel, the fine folks at the TSA security checkpoints have managed to confiscate over a dozen of the fingernail clippers I inadvertently left in my computer bag.  Dangerous weapons?  Somehow, I have my doubts, but the point is to the TSA Security team they fall into the same category as a 17 inch Bowie knife.  Would I want to take on someone armed with a real knife, switchblade or anything thing else?  Heck, no!  This brings us to the question, are we sending our sales teams into a virtual knife fight armed with a measly manicure set? Allow me to get real. Our salespeople go into negotiations with professional buyers on a daily basis, most without real negotiation training.  Further, many sellers and their managers don’t really believe negotiations play a role i...