Peak Sales Recruiting

New research from the Boston University School of Management suggests that the best phrase a sales person can use to build trust and increase likelihood of closing a sales is to respond with “I don’t know” when stumped by a question rather than making up an answer. Perhaps this has to do with the perception [...]

It is conventional wisdom to think that the less base you pay a salesperson the hungrier they will be. While you certainly don’t want to hire reps who are satisfied with just their base, a low base-high commission plan has several downsides: 1. Turnover – If you pay a low base relative to other companies [...]

Many of our coaching clients are CEO’s with limited or no sales background and a question we are often asked is what sales tactics should be learned to close more business. My response is not what you might expect. Rather than quoting sacred sales theories or the latest and hottest sales training, I suggest not [...]

Here is a list of all the best sales movies we’ve seen. If you know of others, let us know and we will add them. Big Kahuna Movie in which Danny DeVito schools up and coming sales rep on the facts of life. Also stars Kevin Spacey. Glengarry Glen Ross Epic movie about regional sales [...]

This economy means a lot of pressure on sales teams and we are hearing stories about reps “overselling” to keep customers engaged and close business, but there is a high cost to being less than honest with customers. As our friend, Colleen Francis, Co-Author of Honesty Sells, Creating Open & Profitable Relationships, points out, “meeting [...]

Geoffrey James at BNET/Sales Machine and I had an ongoing conversation about his Top 10 List and we came up with a new list of the “Top 10 Dumb Lies Reps Tell Managers” – some of them funny and some cliché. If you have worked as a rep and managed sales teams, these will all [...]

One of our readers recently pointed me to this dark story entitled Sales 101 from the barstoolsports site….by way of a glossary, the author writes about his time as an inside sales rep at a tech company. Hopefully your reps aren’t as jaded or disinterested in sales. Sales 101 I graduated from the University of [...]

The old saying goes that if you harm another, by word or by action, the same will somehow eventually happen to you. Does the universe somehow keep score, reward honest behavior and settle debts? Who knows, but it is uncanny how most successful business people have great integrity and a strong moral compass. It makes [...]

Peak does a lot of interviews with salespeople. I mean a lot – tens of thousands a year. The bulk of candidates with whom we meet are ambitious, capable, diligent, accomplished professionals, but from time to time, we come across those who would rather bend the truth than embrace the truth. Some become deceivingly good [...]

When I was much younger, I used to think that it was ok to BS customers and prospects as long as you did it well. Then I became a professional and learned how to make money and the matter of fact is that there is no such thing as good BS. It is usually obvious [...]