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Barry Trailer

Barry Trailer
Barry has been involved in complex B2B sales for over 30 years and is intrigued with how it's changed/changing and what this means to Sales as a Profession (SaaP). Salesware, the analytics company he co-founded, was acquired by Goldmine Software in 2000 and his next company, CSO Insights with Jim Dickie, was acquired by Miller Heiman Group in 2015. He has twice been published by, and been a keynote for, Harvard Business Review, and is author of Sales Mastery, a novel.

Embrace Sales 2.0, or Be Left in the Dust

The history of sales has largely been one of companies perceiving market needs, creating products and services to fill these needs and then turning...

Excuses To Visit Great Places!

As I write this I'm sitting at a Starbucks in Kings Beach at Lake Tahoe, California. In an hour we have a sales...

More on Virgin America

As noted in the previous posting, checking into and boarding my first Virgin America flight was a breeze. The in-flight service is great...

Great Start With Virgin America

Yesterday was my very first flight on Virgin America, from San Francisco to New York. It was TERRIFIC! This new airline home...

Bright New Crop of Sales Graduates

Last month I presented at Ohio University's 10th annual Sales Symposium. The event was hosted by OU's Sales Centre (www.thesalescentre.com), one of just...

Customer Surveys Can Be Short and Effective–and Build Loyalty at the Sales Level

My partner, Jim Dickie, recently vacationed in Vietnam. He stayed in a number of very upscale hotels and on checking out of one was...

Whither “Sales?”

Before CRM it was called SFA—sales force automation. And back in those days, before CRM magazine, it was Sales & Field Force Automation...

When Technology Is an Enabler, Telesales Improves

The old adage is: "Nothing happens until someone sells something." The flip side of this coin, of course, is: "Nobody sells something until someone...

Effectiveness Versus Efficiency: What Happens When Your Sales Productivity Is Maxed Out?

The first time I read Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I was blown away—it all made so much sense. In...

Does Customer-Centric Selling Really Pay Off?

OK, class, once more, but this time with feeling: "People love to buy and hate to be sold." How many times and in how many...

If Your Employees Get No Satisfaction, Watch Out: A Lesson From Herzberg

An academic and researcher, Frederick Herzberg wrote articles focusing upon what motivates employees that have become classics in the Harvard Business Review. He came...

How Do You Design a Customer-Oriented Sales Compensation Plan?

Several years ago, a down-and-out character was standing at the driveway to our local grocery store holding a roughly printed sign: "Will Work for...

Can Sales and Service Play Nice? Of Course

Paraphrasing the prison warden in 1967's Cool Hand Luke, we could say, "What we have here is a failure to collaborate." Today's technological advances...

Sales Performance Is Up–But at a Price

Salespeople are working harder, and they're seeing some payoffs, according to this year's edition of CSO Insights' annual report, Sales Effectiveness Insights—2005 State of...

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