Do you remember the old instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle? I think there are still a few around with those instructions: For best results, Lather, rinse, repeat.” This was actually one of my super successful sales mantras when I was a sales account executive in television, commercial

I helped a friend out a few weeks ago. She has built a team of salespeople underneath her in a business that sells global products made by artisans paid fair wages. The organization commits the profits heavily to humanitarian efforts around the world as well. Her team members are NOT

Our clients are usually classified as “Small Business”—though I absolutely DESPISE that term. The US economy is POWERED by small business! In fact, as of the 2010 census, small businesses make up to 99.7% of employer firms in this country (a “small business” is defined as having less than 500

With the age of the internet, we’ve all become self-diagnosing doctors with medical degrees from Google, right? We are able to search out our symptoms and try to self-medicate, self-prescribe...maybe even self-destruct. When we finally seek out medical help we’ve either worked ourselves into a tizzy about the “worst case

One phrase that I hear often from sellers and businesses when they describe their offers really makes me cringe. I hear it a lot from sellers trying to paint a broad picture to capture as much potential business as possible. Yeah, I get crunchy when I hear, “We’re a One-Stop-Shop

Have you ever done the “Sales Walk of Shame” back to your car in the parking lot after realizing you just lost a sale and thought, “What in the world happened?” You didn’t see that coming. You thought things were looking good for you. Your buyer said things were going

I received an email the other day from a company letting me know my order had shipped. The message came from “customerlove@blahblahblah.com.” Not “info,” not “orders,” but “customer love.” That made me feel special. For two reasons: It always makes me happy to know when my package was shipped and

I often joke about tattoos I would get—if I were the tattoo-ing sort. There are 5 or 6 phrases I use so regularly. They’re soundbites that are recurring in most of our training sessions and after a while, my sellers can repeat them back to me like audience members that

So many of our blog posts and discussions are fruits derived from working through situations with sales teams in sales meetings and training sessions. I’ve written about plenty of my own selling successes and hard lessons learned but I am always in discovery mode looking for better ways to connect

Welcome to the new decade! As a growth-driven agency, branding is a conversation we have regularly with our clients. Unfortunately, we run into a lot of ambivalence concerning the relevance of branding, particularly with our small-medium businesses that we work with. After all, brands are just terms for the big