Posts by Adam Boyd
More Sales Effort Isn’t Always The Answer
At least four times in my career, I’ve watched a company miss something major in the market. What’s interesting isn’t that they missed it. Markets shift. Buyers change. That happens to everyone at some point. What’s interesting is what they did next. Sales effort didn’t drop. If anything, it went up. More calls. More reps.…
Read MoreStop Practicing on Real Prospects
There’s a story I tell whenever someone tells me they hate roleplay. I was in business school. A professor was in the middle of selling his company. Offers ranging from $40 to $75 million on the table. Before he went into any negotiation, his investment bankers ran him through every scenario they could think of.…
Read MoreNotes From Scaling Sales With Confidence
There Are Four Areas You Need to Look at Your Sales Organization: Talent: Do we have the right people in the right roles to get where we want to go? Skill: Do they have the skills we need to sell to our buyer against our competition at our price point? Leadership: Do our leaders know…
Read MoreThe Conversion Math CEOs Get Wrong
You spent $5,000 on marketing last month. Generated 50 leads. Not bad. Your sales team talked to 30 of them. Ran 20 demos. Sent 12 proposals. Closed 4 deals. Total revenue: $34,000. You look at this and think, “We need more leads.” Actually. You need to fix your conversion rate. Let me show you why.…
Read MoreThe 4 Discovery Questions That Make Closing Easy
Your rep is on a discovery call. The prospect is talking about their challenges. They seem engaged. They’re asking good questions about your solution. Your rep thinks: “This is a great opportunity.” Then the deal sits in the pipeline for four months and dies. Here’s why. Your rep never asked the one question that separates…
Read MoreThe Real Reason Deals Collapse Before Contract Signature. And How to Fix It
The deal closed. Your rep is celebrating. You’re updating the forecast. And the deal is about to fall apart. Because nobody protected it. I was working with a professional services firm last year. About $22M in revenue. They were bringing on what would have been their largest client. $180K engagement. The prospect said yes. Verbally…
Read MoreCoaching Through Fear: The Real Reason Reps Miss Quota and What Leaders Must Do
The rep everyone thinks is underperforming I was working with a professional services firm last year. About $18M in revenue. Team of six reps. One rep… let’s call him Bob… was consistently at the bottom. Hitting maybe 65% of quota. Pipeline always looked thin. His manager was frustrated. “Bob just doesn’t put in the effort.…
Read MoreWhy Your Sales Team Is Busy But Not Productive
I was on a call last week with a CEO who couldn’t figure out what was wrong with his sales team. Everyone was working hard. Lots of meetings. Lots of activity. Full calendars. Late nights. But deals weren’t closing faster. Revenue wasn’t growing. The pipeline looked the same as it did six months ago. “I…
Read MoreWant to Double Sales Performance? Stop Hiring and Start Coaching
NOTES FROM NORTHWOOD You know the difference between teams that win championships and teams that stay mediocre? It’s not the salary cap. Every NFL team has the same amount to spend on players. The difference is where they spend their money. Mediocre teams blow their budget on big-name free agents and hope talent alone will…
Read MoreMission ImPossible: 4 Steps to Finding the Truth in Your Pipeline
Mission ImPossible: 4 Steps to Finding the Truth in Your Pipeline Let me know if this scenario sounds familiar… You’ve got a sales team (of some sort). You’re invested in marketing. You’ve got some sales leader or a group of them who are responsible for “driving revenue.” And you’ve got goals for growing your…
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