This topic keeps returning to our conversations. It’s like that proverbial bad penny that keeps showing up (Bad Penny: A person or thing which is unpleasant, disreputable, or otherwise unwanted, especially one which repeatedly appears at inopportune times–definitely NOT Penny my wife.) The latest conversation on sales got started with the bad news that Black Friday was significantly below par and Cyber Monday isn’t going to help. Many pundits are …
Everywhere we go most of us are leaving behind “signals” – dots if you will – about where we’ve been and what our interests were. When we’re moving in the physical world, many of us are more or less tracked by our portable electronic devices. When we move about in the virtual world, we are leaving digital signatures everywhere. This …
In a recent blog post, Seth Godin stated that: “The only reason to build a website is to change someone.” Really? My first response is–I very much disagree. First, what gives me the right to try and change someone? This has to be sales at its worst: Manipulative and Self-Oriented. So maybe I misunderstand Godin’s meaning and intention? Perhaps I’m …
Things are changing rapidly. Not only are our workers younger, so are our customers. The accelerating pace of change means that to survive we will be updating, tweaking, throwing out and rebuilding our business models, processes and perceived “truths.” Yes, for many of us, our most cherished beliefs are being called into question. I’ve written elsewhere about how I think …
We are becoming a “rental nation.” What? Is that bad? You mean we’re willing to forgo the pride of ownership? Personally, I think so. Here’s what David Houle is thinking along these lines – and I very much agree with him on this topic. Four years ago David started to suggest that in the United States, the reorganizational recession of …
I was swiping through Flipboard on my Nexus 7 (okay, let me interpret for some of you. Flipboard is my news/blog aggregator application, that looks like an electronic magazine, running on an Android powered Nexus 7 tablet computer – a tablet other than the ubiquitous iPad) when an LA Times article caught my eye. The article spoke about how many …
Sequestration: Presently, there is a great deal of “stuff” thrown into the air, inked into headlines, and typed into cyberspace about the so-called sequestration. This human-made “disaster” is, depending on whom you listen to, “just what we need to at least begin putting our fiscal house in order.” Or, it is “an unmitigated disaster that will be ruinous for many …
I was supposed to be working on the newsletter. There were several columns left to write (this being one of them) and still, I found myself immersed in a project that could very easily wait for another time when deadlines were not looming. But this little “project” had been percolating in the back of my mind for several weeks. I finally could …
In the previous post, I mentioned the fact that it looks as though this recovery is so slow because we aren’t seeing demand and therefore businesses won’t hire. Many of the businesses with which I work make it pretty clear that for the most part, hiring a new employee is a last resort. After the demand builds, everyone is working …
Who’s Interest? Shocked and disoriented is probably the best way to describe how companies and salespeople are feeling lately. Virtually everyone is husbanding cash. Nobody wants to be “sold” anything. People still want to buy, but only when and what they want, not what someone else wants them to buy. And they don’t really need salespeople; they can find what they …