Happy people…Happy faces You know the quip. about the guy who’s exhibiting every outward sign of being unhappy or upset but who, when asked says he’s totally happy and everything’s fine. Then the quips’ snappy line follows with, “Well, maybe you ought to tell your face that!”. Perhaps that’s something we might want to tell […]
Life to that…dead prospect That really attractive prospect you gave up on six months ago is still “calling your name”. And giving that opportunity just one more try is pretty hard to resist. Regrettably you know they’re still dealing with the same supplier and as far as you know nothing’s changed in their businesses’ landscape […]
Dead opportunities…And revisiting them So that prospect you wrote off last year as unsaleable after multiple calls is dead. Or is it? Now to be frank, if nothing has changed in terms of what you have to offer, the account’s management, or the quality of the current suppliers’ services, chances are that it still is […]
Noise and…Signal issues In almost all forms of electronics the term noise-to-signal-ratio is used to identify unwanted “noise” like static, from the desired signal. Too much noise and the real signal can’t get through. In our world that term also has meaning – although it’s a different kind of noise that’s the problem. For us […]
New ideas equal…new approaches Practicing real creativity can be daunting to most folks. That probably explains why most of us tend to believe we’re more doers than creators of out-of-the-box ideas. And as long as we believe that false idea that notion will always be true. But the fact is creativity is a process that’s […]
Covid, shutdowns and…rediscovering creativity Back when Covid had us its’s early grip and our bread-and-butter customers were shut down we got creative because we had to. Many turned to selling non-traditional customers to fill the gap that challenge created. That included new ideas – like selling sanitizers to police departments to safeguard them from Covid […]
A little recklessness…Maybe a good thing? If most of us were asked to name a dynamic business leader that we admired, the name that would probably come up most often is Elon Musk. Aside from the fact that he’s frequently ranked as the world’s richest person, we’d probably also agree that his most impressive attribute […]
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 […]