September 2016

It happened again. I accepted a LinkedIn invitation from someone I didn’t know, sent a personal response to greet my new connection, and immediately received a cold calling message from someone looking only for lead generation:

In the movie “The Martian,” Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, is teetering on the razor’s edge. He has extremely limited resources and one slip could be the difference between survival and failure. The same is true of many channel partners whoteeter on the edge of business survival.

Several years ago, Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, spoke about “known knowns, known unknowns’’ and the dreaded “unknown unknowns.’’ Rumsfeld omitted one category, however, and that is unknown knowns.

You’re at the proposal stage and, so far, everything appears to be on track to make the sale. That’s why it can come as a huge shock if the deal doesn't close. It will leave you wondering where things went wrong. Here are a few of the most common indicators that it was your proposal that failed to seal the deal.

There are two primary motivators of human behavior: gain and pain. A number of studies have shown the psychological fear of losing something or experiencing pain is twice as strong as the potential to gain or improve something.

There is a lot of talk and training in sales about prospecting and closing, but less is said about what happens after the sale. The post-sale relationship is a Bermuda Triangle for many companies — customers are lost and no one can quite figure out why.

It is uncanny how life events so often intersect with a topic I am writing about in this magazine, or maybe it’s just evidence that the concepts involved in leading work teams and producing peak performance are ubiquitous both in and out of workplace settings.