There is a wise old saying that tells us “A Watched Kettle Never Boils“.

I reckon if you watch a plugged-in, switched on kettle long enough and it doesn’t boil, your kettle is probably broken.

The phrase originated before electricity of course, but it was still nonsense back then.

If your kettle wasn’t boiling, your fire clearly wasn’t burning hot enough or the kettle was too far away from the heat.

Watching it neither warmed it up nor cooled it down.

Here are a few pieces of modern ‘sales wisdom’ doing the rounds – you may have heard a few recently yourself;

“There’s no business out there”

“Nobody’s buying”

“These days, you just can’t get through to the decision maker”

“Customers never return our calls”

“No one is attracting prospects like they used to”

“It’s not about value; it’s all down to price.”

“It’s the wrong time of year.”

If you hear these lines – or spout any of them yourself – take two minutes to answer these next 3 questions and where appropriate, pose them to your team;

• Something needs correcting to improve the quality of our pipeline, what is it?
• If we really want to get things on the boil, how can we get closer to the heat?
• All checked, all working fine – what do we do next to stoke the fire to burn even more fiercely?

I challenge you to answer those three questions with solutions that you can implement immediately and without blaming the marketing department even once.

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My new book – Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction is now available from Kindle and as a Paperback.

If you’d like a preview, you can download the first 30 pages as a PDF document – completely free – by clicking right here

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Chris Murray is founder and Managing Director of Varda Kreuz Training, a UK based company created to deliver sales training that really works – not in theory and not just sometimes, but sales training that really works. You can find out more about Varda Kreuz Training HERE or give us a call right now on 0844 293 9777 (UK)

His other books include The Extremely Successful Salesman’s Club – which has been an Amazon Number 1 Best Seller and heralded as the Da Vinci Code for salespeople.