“Just the facts, ma’am” – is the iconic line parodying detective Joe Friday from the old show Dragnet. Meant to demonstrate the character’s dry approach to interviewing witnesses, sometimes I feel like I’m meeting a live “Joe Friday” when I’m approached by someone trying to sell me a product. No context, no perspective or relevance...Read More

This week marks the start of the last quarter of the year for most businesses. There are holidays, parties, vacations and lots of fun to be had between now and 2016 but don’t think that letting off the gas now and coasting is going to get set you up to grow and compete next year....Read More

“Opt In” or “Subscribe Here” . . . we have come to expect a certain level of value when we surrender our email address to a company and expect some unwritten {and also written} rules to be followed and a significant exchange of something worthwhile to us in response to handing over our email address....Read More

In getting to the business “promise land” – profit and growth, success isn’t always a perfectly pristine theory translated into a formula. Success is tough and dirty work, sometimes even ugly. This week, I had to share a fascinating series of books {and short but insightful blogs} by Roy Osing: BE DiFFERENT or be dead...Read More

This week marks the 100th blog post in The Pipeline. Whew. That is a lot of blood, sweat, tears and dedication to writing to and for our core audience of entrepreneurs, sales pros and leaders. Sharing insights, experiences and perspectives has been the BEST and most important strategy I have implemented in my business. Committing...Read More

Selling to the small or mid sized business owner? That’s about as easy as pinning Jell-O to a wall, right? Business owners have 4,329 priorities in front of YOU, so how does a Sales Pro sell to the Small and Mid Sized Business? With the sheer volume of opportunities—Small and Mid Sized business owners {SMB}—represent...Read More

In the last post, we talked about how to make your sales presentations better – improving the focus of the content and delivery. This week, using more examples from our clients, we present a more specific context of your proposals – a mistake that’s made quite often when we listen to sales pitches which is...Read More

Are you struggling with how Social Media can work for your business? It’s hard to exactly measure the Return on Investment of Social Media but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be leveraging it to grow your business or increase your sales. If you’re not using Social Media to bring your customers closer to you, guess...Read More

Last week, I had to have an unexpected surgery on my sinuses. At the doctor’s office one day and scheduling an urgent surgery for the following day! Wow – talk about a sudden disruption to your “status quo”. One of the first things I had to do was to create an account and login to...Read More

What is “Audience Development” and how do you know if you need to turn your focus and resources there? Audiences are people whom you’ve captivated or engaged for some span of time with some interesting thing, offer or thoughts. When you focus on providing value and being useful in your customers’ worlds, you are being...Read More