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What You Should Never Do on LinkedIn to Conduct Business With Your LinkedIn Network

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I don’t know about you but for every benefit I get from LinkedIn, I get an equal amount of frustration. Some people, like me, have criteria for who they will invite and whose invitation they will accept on LinkedIn. How many times has this happened to you?

Someone invites you to join their LinkedIn network or asks if they can join yours. You accept. And then it happens….

In the first example, I received this message a week after I accepted this individual’s invitation:

“Hello Dave, I noticed we haven’t had a chance to talk yet having been connected now … Read the rest

Reasons Why Salespeople Aren’t Successful at Consultative Selling

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Yesterday, a sales manager I was coaching asked me to explain the difference between a great question and a tough question. I gave him the one-minute version but this article has the expanded version of that answer.

I’ll use my world as an example and ask you to translate accordingly.

In my world, while I might occasionally be on a first call with a senior sales leader, I am most frequently speaking with the CEO. With CEOs, the most-common issue they articulate is “I’m not sure we have the right sales leader.”

We have three levels of questions and it’s … Read the rest

Data Show Most Salespeople Are Dinosaurs When It Comes to Social Selling

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Several recent LinkedIn posts have urged readers to pick up the phone instead of trying to find new opportunities by using social media. I wrote a very popular article about using the phone three years ago called “The Next Can’t Miss Game Changer for Sales.”

I have data that show that the very people who don’t score well at hunting (reluctant, ineffective or both) also score poorly at social selling while those who score the highest for hunting score higher for social selling too. Check out this data:

  • The weakest 10% of all salespeople own the lowest average scores for

    • … Read the rest