Category Archives: sales

How to Prepare for Selling: 3 Really Tough Tips

What selling tips are the hardest for professionals to implement? Previously I introduced 4 tips for preparing the way to successful sales. When you pay attention to these things, your selling becomes a lot easier: be visible, ask your target market, reach out, and be easy to find. These next tips are harder to implement [...]
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2 Tips to Prepare for Good Sales

What other tips do I suggest that paves the way for an effective sales process? Last week I introduced this topic with 2 out of my 7 tips: Be visible, volunteer and get involved in industry activities; write a column Ask your target market questions Here are two more of my tips from the book [...]
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7 Tips for Getting Known in Your Target Market

When planning a sales campaign, once you have a list of target opportunities, what should you do next? When I’m working with clients, coaching them on their selling process, it takes a good degree of clarity and focus to develop a realistic list of prospects. This is no small task. It involves some serious thinking, [...]
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Better Informed, Better Sales

“In a highly competitive crowded marketplace, all other things being equal, the one with the most information about the prospect and market, who knows how to turn it into solutions, will win the sale.” ~ Bill Brooks Bill Brooks was a great sales person I had the opportunity to get to know, before he passed [...]
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How to Build a Network – fast!

When I began my coaching, speaking and writing business, we had just moved to Charlotte, North Carolina from Los Angeles. We knew only five people in Charlotte and two were the realtors, the builder,  his rep, and the lawyer who closed the deal. We moved 2500 miles from our network of friends and associates and [...]
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Positioning and Preparing for Effective Selling

One of the first steps to effective selling is getting clear about how you position yourself and your business. I like to tell the story about my friend Jim, who was looking for more clients for his law practice. One night at our networking group he said, “A good referral for me is someone who [...]
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Selling is Not an Accident: 4 Keys to Plan for Success

The problem with most sales books is that they focus solely on what to say once you are in front of the prospect. That’s not half as important as what goes on before you even set up the meeting.  Planning is probably just as important,  if not more, because there’s a way to set yourself [...]
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What’s Your #1 Business Success Skill?

If you’re a business owner, executive, entreprenuer or other high level professional, sooner or later you realize that your success in business is not about how good you are at doing what you do. Your success depends on how good you are at marketing and selling what you do. You may have known that all [...]
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The Role of Emotions in Leadership Decisions

“Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.” Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 330 BC Aristotle was a student of Plato, and his primary disagreement with [...]
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More Brain “Flaws” in Making Decisions

This is a really good book if you’ve got the same interest as I in how the brain works to make decisions: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Here’s what I’m learning about the duel between the rational brain and the emotional brain, and how it might apply to sales, business [...]
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