5 Mistakes People Make in Sales Meetings – #2 Robot

October 2nd, 2015

The face-to-face meeting with a client, especially the first one, is the single most important event in the sales process. Stumbling block #2 during meetings with new potential clients (read #1-No Traction) takes on the business mantra: "It's not personal, it's just business." If you lose a piece of business with a client to a competitor, does it feel personal? When a startup entrepreneur gets angel funding, do you think it feels personal? When you’ve invested ten years building a team, does it feel personal when that team succeeds or fails? No matter what we think or say, part of being human is that most things that happen to us feel personal Read More...

Inside Closing a Sale – a book review

September 7th, 2012

Brian Tracy wrote a book devoted to closing techniques, The Art of Closing the Sale. Tracy has written a thorough and focused handbook on the most important concept of old school selling: techniques for closing the sale. It covers two dozen techniques, the sandwich close, the secondary close, the walk-away close, the today-only close, the porcupine close, the sharp-angle close Read More...

The Porcupine

April 11th, 2012

My grandfather Al, was a salesman in Texas for the American Seating Company some seventy years ago. Al was a wise and gentle soul, qualities I'm sure he also had when he was a younger man. (I remember him quietly telling my uncle that putting 7-Up in scotch was a good way to ruin it.) He once told me about the air conditioning system in his company car Read More...

The First Conversation

May 1st, 2010

This blog is a merger between structured creativity and selling.  There is a natural union between the two.  Since 1993, I have been exploiting that union for myself and for my clients. This blog is perhaps just another iteration of that exploitation.  It is a sales blog, but underpinning everything in it, is structured creativity Read More...