Productivity Centre

The customer is now in control, and while you're checking them out, they're checking you out too.

I sometimes wonder how many salespeople are still selling the way they were taught twenty years ago. They have their prospecting scripts, their presentations, their objection-handling techniques and their closing strategies. Some even believe that if they can just get in front of enough people and talk long enough, eventually somebody will buy something. Unfortunately, the customer has moved on, and in many cases the salesperson hasn't even noticed.

Years ago, the salesperson had a tremendous advantage. We controlled the information. If somebody wanted to know about our products, prices, features or competitors, they generally had to speak to us. We could arrange the appointment, turn up with our beautiful brochure, deliver our carefully rehearsed presentation and guide the customer through the sales process. We were the experts because we had the information. The customer had the questi...

I was 21, sitting behind a drum kit in a smoky jazz club in Johannesburg, absolutely butchering a Miles Davis number. Our guitarist was brilliant. Our bassist was locked in. Our saxophonist was magic.

And I was rushing the tempo. Just slightly. Enough that the whole thing felt... off.

After the set, our band leader—a 60-year-old keyboard player (Werner Krupski) who'd forgotten more about music than I'd ever know—pulled me aside. "Frank," he said quietly, "you're playing for yourself, not for the band. And when you're out of sync, it doesn't matter how good everyone else is. The whole thing sounds wrong."

                                                     

That conversation changed everything. Not just about drumming, but about how I've approached business for the past 25 years.

I spent a decade playing drums—jazz mostly, some funk and rock, a bit of country when rent was due.

I learned more about leadership, teamwork, and performance in those smoke-filled venues than I ever l...

I had a conversation last month in Amsterdam with a sales director who'd been in the industry for 20 years.

"Frank," he said, looking genuinely bewildered, "I used to know exactly how to close a deal. Now I don't even know when the bloody deal starts."

I laughed. Then I realised he wasn't joking.

Welcome to the new world of sales, where everything you learned in 2015 is about as useful as a Rolodex. (Yes, I'm old enough to remember those.)

Look, the fundamentals haven't changed—people still buy from people they trust, relationships still matter, value still wins. I've been training sales teams across 70+ countries for a quarter-century, and those truths are eternal.

But how those fundamentals play out? That's shifting faster than a politician's promises.

The sales professionals absolutely crushing it right now aren't the ones with the slickest pitch decks or the biggest LinkedIn networks. They're the ones who've adapted to how buyers actually behave in 2026—not how sellers wish t...