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Kathy Glover Scott; Adele Alfano (Editor): Sales Gurus Speak Out: Fifteen Top Sales Experts Share Their Insights on Sales Success
This is a collaborative work by sales experts. Fittingly, Michel's chapter is the lead chapter. It deals with one of the most difficult challenges facing salespeople as well as consultants, advisors and service professionals -- when someone asks you, 'What do you do?', what should you say?
I was surfing around the marketing blogosphere yesterday, and came across this great story from Patrick Schaber. As soon as I read it, I knew I had to share it with you all. It's the best example I've ever come across of how real, honest communication - something that has, in this age of mobiles, Blackberries and email, fallen by the wayside - revolutionized a fast-paced, technology-laden Fortune 500 company.
What spurred this revolution? A couple of chairs.
Welcome, grasshopper, to your second lesson in email management. We have learned how to manage our inboxes, and therefore be better receivers. Now we are going to travel further along the path to electronic enlightenment and learn how to be better senders, through the teachings known as The Four Noble Email Truths. As Buddha says: Through poorly structured emails you may 'solve' one problem, but you sow the seeds for another.
Continue reading "Zen And The Art Of Email Maintenance, Part 2" »
Though I've been copywriting for about six years, I'm still getting my feet wet with the EM approach. It's fascinating to me to take people through the various exercises and worksheets we select for them (which, in my opinion, are more like discovery games)and see what comes out in the process. It's one thing to learn about a client's business and then create their marketing materials - it's a whole other to actually join them on a process of discovery, and help them see their business in a whole new way. We learn about what, why and how they do it - and more often than not, so do they.
'Tis the season for making vows, isn't it? We'll start doing this, we'll stop doing that. We all know the dismal sucess rate of New Year's resolutions, the guilt that starts creeping up around March 15th when we realize, mid-doughnut, that we haven't been to the gym in two weeks.
It's one of the oldest time-management strategies in the book: when you've got a big project looming before you, or a task you're dreading, divvy it up into small, manageable chunks. Makes sense. But for me, a start-challenged procrastinator, this never worked. I'd hack a brochure assignment into little bits - intro, first page callout, etc - and still feel a burning desire to go and alphabetize my DVD's. To me, it seemed like even MORE work than before because I now had all these little bits to tackle. And it hadn't addressed my main problem - how to get started?
Recently a very good friend of mine went to a weekend-long retreat run by a well-known motivational speaker. One of the hallmarks of this speaker’s schtick is getting participants to walk on hot coals - point being, you can do anything you set your mind to. He also uses a lot of music and interaction to get people up and moving and involved. You may know who I’m talking about by now. He's very, very good at what he does.
Today I heard a somewhat random quote that got me thinking about what it means to achieve true success.
The quote is from Orrin E. Klapp's "Symbolic Leaders, Public Dramas and Public Men," (somewhat of a sociologist relic from 1964) which describes an occasion when Albert Einstein was "observed meditatively eating an ice cream cone while watching some men unload a car full of ducks." Klapp notes, "Einstein never cared much for his public appearance but an important executive could not be caught in that kind of pose."
This brought to my mind the famous photograph of Einstein looking straight at the camera and sticking out his tongue. It's an image that has decorated many an office and probably many more a dorm room.
They say you should do one thing a day that scares you.
Well, today, I did three. And guess what? That made it a very good day.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are both frustrating and fascinating at the same time.
They're frustrating because, like Cassandra, we can often see that believing in a particular future will make it come true somehow. They're also fascinating because, like time travel stories, we're drawn to the idea of fighting against destiny with our free will.
We all have self-fulfilling prophecies. In fact, that's how we shape our lives.
One of our clients is leaving.
It’s bittersweet. We’ve enjoyed working with them, and the writing and messaging assignments have been fun. At the same time, they’ve hired someone in-house as a writer, and we’ve finished working on the projects we contracted for.
How do you say goodbye to a client?
