Blog
The FourThirds Blog offers expert advice, tips & sales training enablement content for today's leading sales & learning professionals. We share tales from the road as well as best practices and How-to idea.
Only the Qualified Survive
Any sales manager worth their salt will only forecast a sale once they are satisfied it’s fully qualified. But what does that mean? Just what is ‘qualified’? At its most basic level we’re taught a few simple acronyms. The first one I was taught was MANT. MANT -...
Masking the Objective – A story of Indirect strategy
Some 15 years ago I was consulting to a major account sales team who were selling to a large multi-national ($100Bn+). They were a relatively minor supplier to this customer. The incumbent supplier had over 80% of the spend. This comparative split had existed for over...
You never hear the Bullet that Kills you, a story of Direct vs Indirect strategy
This is a story of woe. Imagine a young salesman. Straight off of closing the biggest deal in his company’s history. $5m of software in 1989. To say I was full of confidence and full of myself would be the understatement of the last millennium. I was working for...
Aristotle in Sales
That Aristotle was one smart Greek. He wasn’t even thinking about sales people at the time, but he still laid some of the key foundations for successful selling. When we think about Greeks and geometry we might think first about that other guy, Pythagoras. But it’s...
Are Rock Stars the Answer?
As brain surgeons go, I guess I would be far to the left of the 1st quartile of a normal distribution. Translation: You probably shouldn’t ask me to perform surgery. As a professional boxer, not much better. I’d likely need a brain surgeon. As a pilot, I’d hopefully...
The Sales-Pilot
Imagine sitting on a plane and the pilot makes the following announcement “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to welcome you on-board our flight today. I just want to let you know that we’re going to have a great taxi and take off. I’ve really mastered those skills....
Hurry up and do nothing
Imagine you are a commercial pilot, you’ve just taken off, you’ve climbed to a little over 2,000 feet and you lose both your engines. You have been hit by a flock of geese. You can’t make it back to the airport and you are surrounded by the concrete jungle of a large...
Haggling
Anyone who has watched the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian, may recall the market scene where Brian attempts to hide, in plain view, from the chasing Romans by appearing to be making a purchase of a false beard from a street vendor. The vendor, who expects to...