Amp Up Your Sales

CHAPTER 33

Building a Productive Pipeline

“Well, the buyers were just liars.”

I was riding the Amtrak Acela up to Boston when a cell phone-toting salesperson sitting behind me uttered this immortal couplet. It was the last day of the sales month, and my fellow passenger, whom I will call Jon, clearly was attempting to rationalize his failure to close a much-needed piece of business to one of his bosses.

Jon’s unintentional verse was almost Shakespearean in the tale of drama, treachery, and tragedy it told in just six short words. It combined a scathing indictment of the fecklessness of the prospective customer with a transparent attempt to shed any responsibility for his obvious failure to win an order that he had no doubt forecast with a high ...