Organizational Issues That Prevent Effective Leadership

There are several problems that organizations face with a typical/average manager based on research published in the Harvard Business Review.  It turns out that many “leaders” are actually not able to perform a leadership function effectively.  It is a real obstacle for companies if someone who is supposed to be  Read More >

Building Teams: Leadership Lessons for CEOs from 150+ Books on Leadership (Over 20+ Years of Reading)

Here is what I learned reading well over 150+ books on Leadership (over 20+ years of reading)
Over the past 20+ years I’ve always had an interest in Team and Organizational Leadership and have read well over 150+ books on the topic of Leadership (including insights from biographies on leaders like Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, Carnegie, and many modern executives and leaders, etc.).  I think it was only  Read More >

What a CEO Does: the Many Jobs of a Growth-Stage CEO

What exactly does a CEO Do?  In the simplest terms, the job of the CEO is to make their company succeed and win. More specifically, this means that the CEO’s job is to lead the company to achieve its long-term goals (3-yr to 5-yr goals) and short-term objectives (quarterly and 1-yr) which  Read More >

The CHAMP Selling System (& the Book)

It’s been over a decade since I developed the CHAMP Selling System (part of which is the CH.A.M.P. qualification acronym that some organizations use today to qualify Leads and Opportunities). I started working on it after selling at IBM and realizing that I was hoping for a different and more  Read More >

3 Phases of Opportunity Management

In every Sales Pipeline you have multiple stages of the Sales Process but there are 3 over-arching phases of managing every Opportunity (aka “managing a sales cycle”). Opportunity Creation I use the PIF approach Opportunity Pursuit Opportunity Closing These 3 phases are the big part of selling.  In each one you  Read More >

What In the World are “UFOs” in Sales?

UFOs in Sales are "Unlikely & Failing Opportunities"
One of the top productivity killers for sales reps is over-focusing and over-investing in low-probability Opportunities (Opps) which clog up your sales pipeline and distract reps from focusing on the high-probability Opportunities. We refer to a bad Sales Opportunity (i.e. Opp) in a slightly comical and symbolic way as a  Read More >