As I read this morning about the Business Roundtable changing this fundamental principle, I was really glad to see it. It’s about time. Several hundred influential CEOs got together and agreed to revise priorities. The next quarter’s profits—which maximizes short-term share price—are no longer the supreme goal and top priority. Here’s the story: AMERICA’S CEOS JUST […]
Establishing Priorities
Are You Selling What You Can Sell or Selling What You Need to Sell?
Most sales people I meet are genuinely busy. They are trying to meet new customers, find new deals, qualify them, move them to closure. It seems to be almost a badge of honor when I speak to sales people, to proclaim the long hours and hard work. Sometimes, they proudly proclaim, “I’m selling everything I […]
Don’t Let the World Define What Success Means for You
Whenever I read popular publications for entrepreneurs, like Inc. and Entrepreneur magazines, I feel like a failure. I didn’t attend an Ivy League college (although I was an academic All-American!). I have no coding skills. I don’t live in Silicon Valley, I’m not an Instagram influencer. I’m not a fearless 22 year old with world […]
Start/Stop/Pivot/Restart Sales Strategies
Sales, as with most things, is something that demands regularity in execution. By that, I mean, there are many things a sales person or manager has to do to perform. Some of the obvious: Prospecting, working deals, planning calls, developing proposals, developing territory/account plans, pipeline management/forecasting, time management, learning/training, one on one’s with managers (hopefully […]
Set SMART Goals & SMARTER Goals
How many times have you set a New Year’s resolution, only to give in to your old ways after a short time? If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there? We all have a tendency to set New Year’s resolutions and goals without giving any thought as […]
Sales, You Have to Do the Whole Job, All the Time
We—or rather my wife—had an incident the other day. We have a housekeeper that comes into our house once a week. Recently, our housekeeper told my wife, “I really don’t like what I have to do here. You have too many bathrooms, I only want to clean one—or I’d love not to clean any. I […]
Learn to Never Handle a Paper or Email Twice
We all do it… to our own detriment. So, let’s make a pact that we will try, if not succeed, to handle our incoming messages more efficiently. Personal time management helps immensely to make a better manager of you and me. All of us have time management tips and tricks to help us get through […]
Valuing Time: Your Customers’ and Yours
Time is the only non-recoverable thing that each of us controls. We waste it, it’s forever lost. We waste our customers’/prospects’ time, we’ve cheated them out of their most precious commodity. We let our customers/prospects waste ours—we’ve enabled them to de-value us and what we can do to help them. Ironically, we seem to treat […]
Time, Our Scarcest Resource
We all know the single thing we cannot recover is time. Once it’s passed, we can never recover it. Most everything else, we do, we can recover from. We can change our strategy if things aren’t going right, we can find new customers if we don’t have enough deals to make our number, we can […]
The One Word That Will Change Your Life
I was annoyed. Seething. Here I was talking with a client that was demanding the impossible. It wasn’t the first time I had these types of conversations. I asked “When do you want delivery?” “Next week” was the reply. My short answer. “Yes…..we can do that”. I was traveling that week and had to pull all-nighters […]
