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...

Let’s start out with the premise you are actively engaged in selling.   Your card may carry a slightly different title.   It seems like nobody has a card with the title “Sales Professional.”   Instead, you could be listed as any one of the following: Sales Engineer Field Engineer Account Manager Account Executive Product Specialist Customer Service Resource Branch Manager Inside Sales Channel Manager Customer Omnibus Person Business Development But somewhere in the details of your job description, you are measured on your ability to grow the number of purchases made by customers under your direction.  This makes you a Sales Professional. As a professional, you have the intrinsic responsibility to perform better than someone who is a selling amateur. With this fact in mind, we must ask the question: “What are you doing to improve your professional skills?" We ask this question often and the answers are s...