Honesty is the best policy, yes, even in sales. Find out why and a few tips for promoting honest sales conversations in this post.

Compensating salespeople is tricky. Almost everyone knows that their compensation plan isn’t the best it can be. They just don’t know what to do about it.

Before, our business followed the Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. Today we do better today to take a cue from the U.S. Marines: improvise, adapt, and overcome.

Some negotiations are easy to overcome. When a client objects that your price is too high, doesn’t understand the price breakdown, or claims you made a mistake, you can deal with the objection simply. You simply diffuse it and move on. It’s barely a blip on your radar. But there’s a more difficult type of objection that poses the threat of bringing the entire negotiation to a stop. When these come up, there’s a real likelihood that all the work, proposals, and your many attempts to really understand the client may have been for nothing. These are second-level objections.

Customer experience is how the client feels about you during every interaction at every step along the way, starting from the very beginning.

If you want to avoid undermining your hard-won efforts to be more profitable, more scalable, and more efficient, you need to keep your sales strategy focused.