You are browsing the archives of 2008 January.

In all cases, experience drives outstanding sales performance. Depending on how you apply your experience, your performance will be outstandingly good or outstandingly bad.
Experience without perspective is catastrophic. In sales, there is a trap we fall into called “the halo effect”. It means taking one experience and generalizing it to apply to all similar situations.

This […]

Success breeds complacency. But what happens if a star sales rep stops learning? Stops challenging himself? Well, nine times out of nine, it spells T-H-E E-N-D, especially these days when business practices and technologies change at breakneck speed.
Yet, nothing is easier than talking oneself into complacency.

I’ve already paid my dues.
I’m incredibly successful. People should be […]

Many thanks to Bob Hruzek for letting me kick off his latest “What I Learned From 2007 Group Project Blogapalooza!”
I might have earned this honor by completed the project about half an hour after he announced it. In any event, Middle Zone Musings is one of my favorite blogs. Bob writes with humor and depth […]

Patience has never been one of my virtues, but today’s slow loading Web pages - especially blog home pages - would test the patience of Job.
As blogging has grown in popularity, so has it grown in complexity. Side bars have become salad bars. Badges, banners, buttons, and widgets, widgets everywhere. Recommendations, links, awards, events, comment […]

Sometimes an idea that looks great in your head doesn’t look so hot on paper. The idea of an alien making a crop circle with his tractor still seems funny to me, but somehow it just doesn’t work as a cartoon.
Crop circles - funny.
Aliens on tractors - funny.
But … maybe the concept is too complicated, […]

Most sales people would rather jump into a cold Lake Michigan than jump into a day of cold calls. When reps start their careers, they make colds call because they have to. Over time, as they build a base, the urgency of cold calling fades. A day of cold calling becomes half a day. Then […]

In this season of renewal and resolutions, I’m offering a series of posts on six bad sales habits. Each habit is worse than the one preceding it - kind of like a descent into sales hell. Unappealing as the subject matter is, all these habits are ones highly successful sales people can easily fall into […]