A recognized expert, writer, and speaker on leadership for business growth
RECENT ARTICLES
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Motivating People Starts with Building Emotional Connections
If you want to inspire and motivate others to achieve high levels of performance, tap into the power of emotion. In the research for our book, The Inspiring Leader, my coauthors and I analyzed 360-degree survey data on 25,000 leaders...
FORBES
Your Salespeople Are Setting Your Strategy (Are You OK with That?)
If a sound strategy consists of the profile of your ideal client in terms of demographic and psychographic, in addition to how you are uniquely positioned to help, then it’s unequivocally true. Your salespeople are setting your company’s strategy.
SALESFORCE
Why Your Product Launch Is Likely To Fail (And How to Prevent It)
Getting a new product or service to market is tough and there are myriad factors that impact success. Whether the new offering comes from bold innovation, cross- organizational collaboration to create new solutions, or simply next generation products and services, the product launch is a critical component...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Is Your Sales Team Struggling to Sell Solutions?
One of the most common concerns expressed by CEOs about their sales organization is that they aren’t consultative enough and that they need to do a better job of selling solutions. In fact, global...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Why CRM Projects Fail and How to Make Them More Successful
The primary reason CRM systems miss the mark in helping companies increase revenue is because they are too often used for inspection, rather than creating improvement in the sales process...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Would Customers Pay for Your Sales Calls?
When I speak to audiences of sales professionals and ask, “How many of you sell value versus price?” everyone raises their hand. But my next question “So how do you do that?” is frequently followed by an uncomfortable silence. Many consider themselves to be value sellers but few are able to articulate what that really means.
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Peter Drucker and other leadership thinkers have long argued that leaders should focus on strengthening their strengths. How should they do that? Improving on a weakness is pretty easy and straightforward: You can make measurable progress by...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
How to Get Your Salespeople to Execute Your Strategy
Sales professionals make decisions every day about what prospects and customers they will be meeting with, what products or services they will highlight in their pitches, and even what elements of your value proposition they will emphasize...
FORBES
Don't Innovate. Create a Culture of Innovation.
While many organizations focus on addressing problems, the most successful focus on raising the bar. One of the ways they do this is by creating a culture where innovation thrives. When this organizational strength is magnified, it can become a source of competitive advantage...
Scott K. Edinger has published over 100 articles for leading business publications including Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and more.
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Sales Teams Need More (and Better) Coaching
On the ride back from Redwood City to San Francisco, my manager John and I hardly said a word to each other. We’d just left the headquarters of Oracle, and one of my worst sales calls ever. During the meeting, I had done my best to identify specific objectives the company might have...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
3 Ways to Motivate Your Sales Team — Without Stressing Them Out
While it is the sales team’s job to bring in business, simply cranking up the heat to get the numbers you want can produce an environment where stress backfires. Too much stress in any professional situation will mask talent and lead to poor decision-making. Instead...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Good Leaders Know You Can’t Fight Reality
The ability to accept reality is one of the most useful, and most misunderstood, skills for a leader. It’s a concept that has been around for centuries in philosophy and more recently in psychology, and properly applied can help drive change...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Are You Paying Attention to the Right Sales Metrics?
Executives are responsible for the future value of any business. So, having a useful dashboard of leading indicators that are predictive of the overall health of the revenue stream is a valuable asset. Rather than “measuring to prove” with the typical data found in...
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle
In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I’ve never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I’ve seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I’ve reviewed over the years...