The Great Sales Irony of Prohibition If you were a salesperson around 1918 and were asked what the concept of “Prohibition” would mean to the sales profession, your answer probably would have been “less drinking, less entertaining, more professionalism.” As it turns...

Sales Definitions Salespeople Should Know, Letters A through K from 1926 Starting in May’s edition of How to Sell magazine in 1926, W.L. Barnhart compiled something he called the “Salesman’s Dictionary”. Each month included another set. While there are so many...

Sales Leadership Training: Too Seller-Centric? Let’s start with the obvious issue that’s been talked about for years: The vast majority of those in sales leadership have not received training on how to run a sales team. Or, at the very least, rarely receive any sort...

Modern Price Discrimination - And How to Fix It Are we practicing something today in sales that would be called “price discrimination”? Reading a 1926 Sales Management magazine article titled “When It Is Against the Law to Cut Your Prices,” I was struck by how our...

Five Lessons For Starting a Speaking Career So you want to get into speaking? Recently, I was invited to speak to a group of individuals exploring how to get on more stages and establish themselves in the speaking world. I did it by accident, but I have some lessons...

Is Negotiation Broken? How the SaaS and AI Era Changed Everything Is it naive of me to think that traditional negotiating approaches are no longer sustainable? Am I biased? Fundamentally, sales is still sales. Arthur Sheldon’s definition from 1924 is still as true...

Your First 30-60-90 Days As a Sales Leader A few years ago, I was invited to interview for a Chief Revenue Officer role at a tech company based in Chicago. I was the 13th candidate they had interviewed for the role. The question you’d expect to be asked came up: “How...

The Impact of AI on Sales: A 70-Year Perspective Every few weeks, I hear, “Todd, this time it’s different. AI is changing everything. We’re in the greatest sales technology revolution of all time.” Maybe. But then I, again on a Friday night (nerd), read an article...