Successful Workplace

Yesterday, I was going through my backlog of LinkedIn invitations, and I had a feeling of fatigue. Description: Overachieving, Highly Successful, Proven, Results driven, Strategic, Consultative, Solutions-Oriented, Problem-Solver, Goal-Oriented, with expertise in new customer acquisition, profitability enhancement, pipeline development and process improvement. Brings me to a conference I spoke at. The topic was “The Customer […]

The public wants both a seamless shopping experience across any retail channel (mobile, online, in store) and is happy to research online (AKA ‘webrooming’) and buy from a brick and mortar store. These were two of the strongest conclusions in the Seamless Retail Research released by Accenture on April 15th. This isn’t a shocker for […]

You know the drill… You’ve got an executive’s undivided attention for the length of an elevator ride. What can you say in that 60 seconds that will spark interest, provide enough detail to show credibility, and land a follow-up meeting? I recently attended an enlightening presentation by Rick Coplin and Greg Pugh of the TechColumbus business incubator on […]

Predictive analytics is big business now. Hand in hand with Big Data they represent one of the only ways to get to know your consumer market and understand how they’ll behave under conditions, respond to marketing and react to incentives. But the problem with all of this is that it’s a constant cat and mouse chase, consumers are […]

Managing a sales course this week and if there’s one thing I hope to instill in the class, it’s a message about intent. People smell your intent like a dog smells fear. Don’t believe me? Consider what happens each time you sit down on the airplane next to someone else. Whether you realize it or […]

In this day and age, most unsolicited business calls go unanswered. Modern sales and marketing professionals are up against savvy buyers that are more empowered than ever by easy access to detailed product information on the Web. Everyone is connected to the latest information. And if buyers don’t want to hear from marketers, they have […]

This week a US Senator wrote to a tech firm which tracks and monitors consumers and asked them to change their practices. Euclid Analytics uses technology and data to help retailers build a consumer relationship by turning in-store behavior into insights and recommendations for improving marketing, merchandising, and operations. They do this by using the […]

It doesn’t matter whether you’re reaching out to Aunt Shirley or your customer, being social in the wrong way breaks what I call the ‘social contract’. The social contract is the tacit understanding of why people follow, subscribe, arrive at a site or click on a link. Break the contract and you will not be […]

Within a week three big and well established UK retail chains will more than likely disappear for good. For Jessops that’s already happened, for HMV and now Blockbuster it’s about to. It continues the trend from the last couple of years that the High Street is dying and dying fast, for goods that can be […]

My team and I have spent the past several weeks getting ready for our sales kickoff taking place next week in sunny San Diego. The number of hours going into the work is sizable but the expected payoff is a field sales force fired up for the new year. After four quarters of battle and the […]

Would you want to sit through your own presentations? I’d like to think I would but the reality is that most people wouldn’t ask themselves that question before putting together their next ‘killer deck’. That’s how we get to where we are. Now take into consideration the problem of virtual presenting, where we don’t see […]

I just read Daniel Goleman’s piece on storytelling & leadership. I thought about all my own lessons learned as a sales manager; and how easy it was for me to stop doing the things that served me well as a salesperson, when I became a manager. You know those times in life where you catch […]

I was always curious how some people, the very few, get others to open up and reveal themselves, while the majority of us struggle.  The sales training industry has given us the ‘diagnose/prescribe’ model, as a way to get other human beings to open up. But does it? Maybe it’s not about diagnosing/prescribing?  What if […]

Marketing and Sales have long been at odds over whether it’s better to generate a large volume of leads or if it’s better to generate fewer, higher quality leads. Anyone involved in Sales or Marketing today, however, knows that the volume game is over. But the question still lingers: How do you get Marketing to […]

I remember years ago watching Steven Seagal come back from a coma to kick Senate butt in Hard To Kill, and the particular scene where he scribbles an old proverb on the toilet seat that the anticipation of death is worse than death itself. Of course, it was a self-fulfilling prophesy, the evil senator is […]

I remember the pain of writing essays in high school. It went something like this. Draft a 3 point, 3 to 5 page first draft by hand. Type the draft up using my Brother typewriter. Turn it in. Get the comments from Mr. Jones, my English teacher. Make manual corrections. Type it up again. Repeat. […]