How do you become a trusted advisor leader?

Those years in South Korea have been the toughest of my life, but at the same time, I learnt to become a leader for my team…and this lesson is not something I couldn’t have possibly learnt from any book.

You see…you can read everything you want on paper, but as long as you don’t experience it, this knowledge doesn’t get integrated into your thinking and doesn’t get applied.

Before being a leader, I didn’t really make the difference between a leader and a manager… I didn’t know that the gap was so huge.

I used to read those “Great leaders do this, bad managers do that” kind of articles… but those article are generally just written to attract the attention with few bullet points rather than really describing what it feels to be a leader.

Here’s what I learnt about leadership, the reality behind the scene:

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Why you NEED to study Sales to be successful

When I started to work in technical Sales, I wasn’t convinced at all of the need to learn about Sales.

I was thinking that “Sales” is not something that could or should be learnt… because:

1- People choose to buy if they want and if they need what I have to sell.

2- If what I sell is really good, I don’t need to sell anything, people will see it and buy it.

I was blind and stupid.

face palm sales

That’s something that I can only tell after “experiencing” how much I was wrong…

(and that’s not easy to say it, but that’s the truth…)

I don’t know if you feel the same than me but sometimes I just think “I am so right” and I try to prove to everyone around how much I am… to discover few weeks (or months) after that I was in fact telling bullshits…

Here are the reasons I was wrong

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Should I trust him when a prospect tells me”I will buy if you develop this feature”?

I guess that’s a big problem for technically complex problems because so many factors are involved that it is most of the time very difficult to say where the problem actually lies.

Most of engineers are thinking that it is because of the product you’re trying to sell is not good enough or doesn’t have enough features…but that’s just not the reality.

Let’s face it, even if you met every day some prospects telling you that they won’t buy because you don’t have a specific feature that they want, don’t be deceived that it is the true reason.

Think about it… If you develop this feature, will this customer buy?

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