“Disparaging what one cannot obtain, as in The losers’ scorn for the award is pure Sour Grapes.” This expression alludes to the Greek writer Aesop’s famous fable about a fox that cannot reach some grapes on a high vine and announces that they are sour. By nature, sellers are competitive. The best salespeople are naturally...Read More

Everyone hates to fail. We don’t want to admit to failure. I despise it. Even though we’re familiar with sayings that tell us how much we learn from failure, how it makes us stronger . . . and all those other rah-rah messages. Sure, we learn what we SHOULD have done. That’s easy to see...Read More

A while back I was in Washington DC giving a spectacular talk on Personality as a Seller’s Competitive Advantage. Along with my co-host of The SellOut Show, Dianna Geairn, we were invited to speak to the Institute for Excellence in Sales (IES) membership audience and as a mutually beneficial perk, the day before our early...Read More

  We run across this situation quite often. You started a business. You hustled. You busted your behind. You earned trust. You demonstrated experience and credibility. You brought in the customers and your business took off. But at a certain point, you spent less time selling and more time “doing” and running the business. At...Read More

Who’s the winningest woman in US Winter Olympics History? That would be Longtrack Speed Skater Bonnie Blair with 5 Gold medals and 1 Bronze. This past week, Bonnie Blair joined our annual Women Sales Pros conference as a guest speaker and shared some fantastic life lessons about training, competing, and reaching your goals. Her stories...Read More

We’ve seen some amazing examples of leadership, kindness, and compassion from individuals AND from business organizations during the Coronavirus Pandemic. We’ve also seen shady, opportunistic behavior, and businesses price gouging, gobbling up resources, et cetera. Our business behavior matters. Future customers AND future employees will want to know how a business treated its customers, employees,...Read More

If you’re feeling like the world has turned upside down, or that we’re living inside an episode of The Twilight Zone, you’re not alone. Every day of these past few weeks has brought new, strange, and scary uncertainty with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic that is running rampant worldwide. We’re not only facing a...Read More

Last week, amid the hustle and bustle of clients and travel plans, I made time to attend the FedEx Executive Women’s Day out at TPC Southwind, at the invitation of my friend and financial planner. I have to admit, I was in the weeds last week and I didn’t do my own due diligence to...Read More

This post evolved from a conversation with a colleague, Gina Trimarco, of Pivot10 Results, a leadership, sales, and service trainer, a studier of people, and a fantastic business sage. Gina uses analogies and metaphors in much of her training and coaching so I challenged her to take part in our March Madness Business blogging and...Read More

Most small businesses don’t yet have a sales team. All the “selling” has been shouldered by the owner from the launch and through the growth of the business and that owner wears way too many hats. For successful businesses, at some point, the owner decides that growth requires sharing that “sales” hat and then seeks...Read More