Frogs, prospects…and negotiating When selling ends and negotiating begins, we have to be especially attuned to what we’re seeing. There are a lot of scenarios and styles that negotiating can take. But the two we see most often are pretty much summed up as “all or none” and “nibbling” for those little compromises. That first […]
The sale’s made…Or is it? So you crafted a great presentation, delivered the perfect close and the buyer even agrees…Eureka! But the then prospect utters the ever famous “There’s just one more thing though” phrase. Now when you were a newbie, you would have thought “so what? How big a deal can that detail be? […]
Mining for gold…Finding weaknesses Discovering those unknown weaknesses in our quiver of skills isn’t exactly straightforward. If it was, they wouldn’t be mysteries and we’d be aware of them. The starting challenge is being open to discovering them. And maybe the best and quickest path to doing that is to ask others what they think […]
Aspirations versus …actionable goals Aspirations are fine and can lead to a lot of important accomplishments. But sometimes like our dream as a kid to be a professional baseball player or fireman, they can also lead to long forgotten intentions that were either unrealistic or just never properly followed up on. Our grown-up aspirations […]
Teaching them just …just like we learn Some think that teaching is easy. Why it’s just a matter of telling the trainee what they don’t already know. But effective teaching is much more than reciting what they need to know and then calling it good. First it largely involves understanding human nature. And that requires […]
Memories and …Checking them Memory can be a very deceiving skill. As trial lawyers know all too well eyewitnesses are often dead wrong about what they’re dead certain they saw – or more correctly what they think they saw. Take that new account we took from a competitor recently. His products and lackluster service consistently […]
Softness vs. absorbency…or maybe happy skin When it comes to laundering bed sheets the challenge is striking that perfect balance between achieving a pH that’s modestly below 7.0 while achieving the softness that appeals to guests. For terry it’s less a Ph concern and more the need to achieve the desired softness guests want while […]
Some hot thoughts… On heat sanitizing While we sell our sanitizers and disinfectants to control harmful bacteria chemically, we understand that isn’t the only way to get that job done. We know that principally because in our high temp accounts we rely on that 180-degree final rinse to accomplish that task for the obvious public […]
A penny saved…A germ killed When we’re pitching our disinfectant versus that competitor’s sanitizer the difference between those two products may be less than a tenth of a percent (99.99% vs. 100%) in their killing power of the pathogenic bacteria listed on their labels. But unless we explain it properly the customer probably wont realize […]
Horns, Baskets…And surviving When that new F&B director, Chef or GM arrives we’re probably justified in being concerned. Understandably our first impulse is to look to the folks we worked with to support us in retaining the business. And while that’s reasonable, we need to realize that they’re likely undergoing some of the same anxieties […]