As sales and relationship management professionals, we are trying to steer customers and prospects to make decisions in our favor. These decisions will allow us to help them drive important outcomes. Gaining these commitments is rarely easy, and in many cases, we have to overcome serious...

As sales and relationship management professionals, there are few tools more important to our success than our network. We look to develop coach relationships, uncover and gain access to decision makers, and deal effectively with gatekeepers. 

Throughout the course of the pandemic our job has been getting more difficult. Restricted access to customers and prospects, supply chain issues, and an environment of general uncertainty made acquiring new customers and managing existing customers much more challenging.

As we move...

Many of us are feeling pressure now more than ever. We need to win new deals, extensions, and renewals. At the same time, things are more complicated than ever before – there are more stakeholders involved from the customer side, we face internal hurdles, economic uncertainty looms, etc. This...

Most of us find ourselves in competitive situations where we need to do some homework to understand specific competitors better. Here are a few thoughts on how to do this well:

As another calendar year wraps up, many of us are surprised at the ongoing impact of the pandemic and remain limited in our ability to sell and manage customer relationships in an in-person manner. For so many of us, much (or all) of our work is still being done virtually.

One thing we...

In our efforts to understand our customer’s business, we have 2 primary sources to utilize – data and information. To us, data refers to publicly available facts and figures. Information is the inside story that you can only get from people who have an insider’s perspective. Both sources are...

In the previous Tips of the Month (August and September 2021), we shared some ideas about creating a powerful competitive strategy - doing your homework on the competitive situation and assessing your strengths and weaknesses. Once these steps are done, you may be ready to develop your...

In the previous Tip of the Month (August 2021), we shared the idea of doing some specific homework when facing a competitive situation. One element of this homework is to consider our competitor’s strengths and weaknesses – in general, and in this unique situation. Areas of consideration include...

We all face it. Whether we are trying to unseat an incumbent, protect our turf, or expand our presence within our customers, we face tough competition. That competition can come from traditional rivals, emerging competitors, or even the customer itself in the form of internal operations. Due to...