David Bliss

The drive to my client that morning was surreal and completely different from the dozens of other drives I made to their location over the past 10 months. We were at the finish line for what was a really big deal. I was trying not to think about the money I stood to make for […]

Milling around the gate where my flight was about to board, my phone buzzed from a text. American Airlines was giving me advance notice of one of the glamorous benefits of air travel. Before I could fish my phone from my pants pocket, the groans of the other text recipients indicated it was bad news. 

One morning in the past few weeks while giving gratitude, I pronounced my grace for a manager who hired me for my first job at a publicly traded company. I worked my ass off to get this opportunity, but it wouldn’t have mattered had this gentleman not taken a chance on me, a sales guy

This deal dwarfed anything we’d ever done before. Our software performed well supporting a dozen users but we’d never landed a client who would have over 500 simultaneous users on the system. The application was designed to handle large volumes of users but to this point, none of our clients ever proved the design. We

December is a pivotal time of the year for most salespeople. The runway to close the big deals in play shortens each day and each day introduces unforeseen hurdles to leap over. The sales managers, vice presidents and often, even CEOs press to get these critical deals over the line. It’s an opportunity to observe

The simplest act can have the most profound impact on your sale. A genuine expression of gratitude can take many forms. “Thank you for your business,” or “I’m so grateful for your help,” or even a handwritten letter expressing your sincere appreciation for sharing time and insights can be powerful messages when delivered the right

I never had to pay for advice, insight or direction from the myriad players involved in selling my products or services, and sometimes the advice I got was exactly what I paid for it. I have received some shockingly dreadful information from well-meaning participants in my career.    For example, one of the sales training

Larger organizations host award trips for their top-performing salespeople that can provide once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Some firms do these trips really well,  and others don’t really know (or maybe don’t care) about making these events special. All-expenses-paid vacations in Fiji, Bora Bora, Australia, China, and other exotic destinations are the stuff of dreams for most people.

My client was a significant player in the pharmaceutical business. The account was transitioned to me after the account executive covering the client moved on to another company. The relationship with the customer wasn’t in the best shape. This was made abundantly clear when the company’s chief information officer (CIO), well known for dressing down

 I finally got my first significant deal within a couple of steps of closing at the publicly traded software company where I was masquerading as a new enterprise software account executive. It wasn’t clear to me how long those few steps would take my customer to complete, but I was confident they’d get it done