Posted: November 2, 2013 | Categories: Sales, Self-Improvement, Time management

If you were to ask me what the most important character component of success is, I would immediately say, PERSISTENCE.  All people who live the life of their dreams have this quality in abundance.  They know what they want and they want it so badly they would eat nail for breakfast to get it.
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Posted: November 1, 2013 | Categories: Sales, Time management

“We’re lost but we are making good time”

That’s what my father would say on our family vacations whenever we got lost.  I find some businesses have a similar philosophy when it comes to how they focus their sales activity.

Yesterday, I was helping a client with their sales strategy for 2014.  They had done their homework, and had their prospect list.  Now it was time to categorize the list.  They broke the list down into these categories in order of priority:
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Posted: October 31, 2013 | Categories: Leadership, Self-Improvement

Have you ever met a friendly person who for some reason wasn’t friendly to you?  Puzzling, isn’t it?  It is true:  We can’t please everyone.  We also wonder if there is some way we are coming across that is turning people off.

Almost all of us have “blind spots”.  These are areas about ourselves that need improvement – we just aren’t aware of them.  Those who know us and like us usually don’t say anything about these.  Sometimes they don’t even notice the flaws.
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Posted: October 30, 2013 | Categories: Leadership, Team Building

Remember the game of telephone?  Most of us played it at birthday parties when we were of grade school age.  We all gathered in a circle as the leader or host whispered some silly phrase in the first person’s ear.  The first person whispered the message to the one on his right and the pattern continued until the message had gotten all around the circle.  The only rule was that the message could not be repeated.  You heard it once, and that was it.  When the last person to hear the phrase was asked to identify the message, there were always plenty of laughs.  The message was usually quite different from the original.

In teamwork, just like the game of telephone, communication can get distorted as it is passed along.
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Posted: October 28, 2013 | Categories: Leadership, Team Building

I would like to put the spotlight on who I believe are the most persecuted group of people on earth – the “nitpickers”.  You know who I am talking about.  These are the folks who take your marvelous idea or plan and start poking holes in it.  They say things like, “What about this?”…”What could happen if?”…”Have you ever considered these possible consequences?  All of a sudden, we creative people get defensive and even irritated.  When this happens the communication wall goes up, and the quality of the collaboration goes down.
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