Matt and Joe walked off the plane and into Concourse B at Denver International Airport. An arrivals-and-departures screen informed them that Joe’s connecting flight to Chicago would leave shortly from a gate just a few steps away....

Every business leader wants a productive, efficient, and effective sales organization—one that consistently hits quota. So why do recent studies suggest that two-thirds of sales reps fail to hit quota?...

Matt glanced out the window at the mountainous terrain passing slowly below. The plane’s scheduled arrival in Denver was half an hour away. Quick flight, he thought. Or maybe it just seems that way because I’ve learned more about selling on this plane than I did in nine years on the job....

“I’ve sold myself, and I’ve sold my company,” Matt said. “Iverson ought to be ready to consider his third buying decision. So now I open Act 6 and sell my product, right?”...

Assuming I did everything right in Acts 2, 3, and 4, Iverson has made the first of his five major buying decisions: He has bought me. So now we move on to Act 5: I sell my company...

If I’m following correctly, agreeing on the client’s need is the climax of everything that’s happened in the drama so far. It’s what Acts 2 and 3 were building up to. And if I performed well in those earlier acts, then Act 4 should be short and sweet....

We live in a world where most products and services have become commodities. Whatever you’re selling, chances are that other companies sell something very much like it. If you’re peddling a commodity, the buyer has very little reason to choose between you and your competitors on any basis except...

“Burn this in your memory,” Joe said. “All five of those decisions take place in the course of any major purchase. They are always made in the same sequence. And your job as a sales professional is to help the buyer make them in the proper sequence. If you get out of sync with the customer’s...

A sales rep may have any number of goals or objectives for a client call, many of them excellent and even vital: to learn about the customer’s business, to discover who the competitors are, to figure out who makes the real buying decisions for the customer’s organization, to learn if funds are a...

Webster defines a plan as a set of actions that have been thought of as a way to achieve something. That’s exactly what happens in Act 1....