Today I'm interviewing Player Map founder Scott Leland on location in Provo, Utah. With 20 years across 50 countries in the making, Player Map is a SaaS-based technology that is fully integrated into 5 Online and our Sales Success System (S3).Player Map is a Visual Sales Plan that graphically maps the key political players in a sales pursuit, so a sales professional can quickly see on only one page how they are currently positioned and what bridges they need to build to the clie […]

Team Ninety Five 5 is in San Francisco at Dreamforce this week, the cloud-computing event of the year presented by our friends at Salesforce.com. And we're looking to meet up with old friends, new prospects and future partners.  We'll give you a tour of our latest SFDC integration capabilities… and yes, we're buying the first round afterward (leaded or unleaded). We'd also like to pick your brain to see how our Sales Success System (S3) has helpe […]

Power tools have a lot of different uses. We call the "Call Plan," the "Business Opportunity Worksheet (BOW)" and "Decision Grid (D-Grid)" power tools because they can be applied in a variety of ways and help you to accomplish more in less time. A great scene from Clint Eastwood's film "Gran Torino" takes place between Clint's character, Walt Kowalski, and his young neighbor who is in Walt's garage asking about his large t […]

Summer is drawing to a close (unless of course you live in Australia). A common summer pastime is reading a book. Perhaps it's one that has been sitting on the shelf or something recommended to you by a peer (or coach). I find when I read a good book I think, "wow, there are some great ideas in there."  If I don't do something about it though, the ideas quickly become forgotten. I need to somehow work those ideas into my work or personal life. Some steps I […]

This is the last in a three-part series to help you identify and qualify strategies to create sales team success. In this post, we'll look at "what," "who" or "what else" might be impacted and might prevent us from achieving success. We'll also ask questions around resources and decisions, all of which are meant to help us further qualify our ideas before we start looking for and implementing solutions.ContextYour identified actions will be a lot […]

Rick Robey played for the 1981 NBA Champion Boston Celtics and that's just one of his many (many, many) career accomplishments. The guy is a winner!Today Rick is a successful business owner and entrepreneur -- and he's not too bad on the golf course. I had the opportunity (and pleasure) to speak with Rick recently about what he felt were among the keys to success.Rick made it very simple.  He boiled it down to the 5% that nets the 95%.He said: "It's about t […]

Customers are compelled to act by two basic motivations: Getting away from what they don't want and going toward what they do want. You may think of these two compelling forces as pain or gain, or maybe the carrot and the stick.If a salesperson walks into a busy executive's office and asks, "What keeps you up at night?", would you expect the reply to be, "That is a fantastic question! I'm going to clear my schedule so I can spend all afternoon explaining m […]

Today I decided to do my first "vlog," and what better place than from one of my favorite family vacation spots, Evergreen resort on Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada. Coming here each year is a tradition with my family. Learn how traditions can strengthen the relationships between you and your clients.

In my last blog post, I discussed how to uncover the top three leader actions to ensure sales team success. We applied the Ninety Five 5 approach for uncovering clients' top business issues. Now, I'd like to continue with this approach to explore how we might determine criteria for success and what the potential payoff will be if we executed on our top ideas.By doing so we are essentially qualifying what we perceive as the top actions to ensure sales team success. If there is […]

This Stanley Bing masterwork is one of the funniest and most accurate accounts of the banality of executive life -- and a must-read for anyone who aspires to climb the corporate ladder. The book begins at an executive retreat in Pittsburgh and ends in a penthouse in New York City. In one fell swoop, a small team of corporate backbiters constructs and deconstructs "the deal of the century." It's like the business version of the "The Hangover," replete with HR vi […]