Most people start their business with a broad target. We throw some things up against the wall to see what sticks. Our biggest fear is that no one will buy, and so we try to sell to everyone! By trying to be everything to everyone, we weren’t the perfect thing for any client! Plus, we…
Normally around this time of the year, it’s good to pause and review our progress. Take a minute to stop and review what’s been going well so far this year, what’s not, and plan how we can end the year strong. But this year… 2020… Well, it hasn’t gone according to plan, right? I don’t…
2020 started with protests in Hong Kong, then bushfires in Australia. In the US, we had impeachment hearings and an over 1000 point drop in the stock market. Then came COVID and shutdown/quarantine, which sent millions of workers into a long work-from-home (with children “e-learning”) experiment. That was just the first quarter. Since then, we’ve…
So we’ve qualified our leads, then we discovered the scope of their issue and educated them about the implications it has for them, now it’s time to close the deal. Do you: A. Send a proposal via email and wait for your prospect to call? B. Give your prospect a call, “Just to follow up…
I was helping my friend move into their new house. Like many houses in Chicago, the wiring in this house was antique. The inspector had told him to call an electrician before he moved in, but he wasn’t sure it was needed. The plugs all worked, the lights came on, that’s enough, right? While we…
When you are responsible for sales, you have only one currency to spend — your time. So, it’s incredibly painful to spend time with a prospect and then find out that they don’t have the money, or they don’t see the value in your services. It’s especially painful when you’ve invested time with a prospect, created…
When I started my business, I knew that I had to get better at sales. I didn’t know the first thing about sales, and I knew I had to sell or starve! I dove into an expensive training course that taught me a specific consultative selling process. (It cost about as much as a year…
The pandemic has made it hard to know how to sell from week-to-week. Early on, the shock of the pandemic and the adjustment to work-from-home soaked up a lot of time and attention. For many, the idea of doing outreach in that climate felt tone-deaf. As the quarantine took hold, it was the fear about…
Over the last week, I’ve been fortunate to have phone calls with five new prospects — business owners who are committed to building their business even in the middle of everything that is 2020. I had five very different phone calls. One had seen the market for their $2.5M production business collapse, they have turned…
I used to read business books voraciously. Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, David Maister, Patrick Lencioni, I loved reading and learning from these business giants. They taught me so much! But, after a while, my desperation to voraciously consume business books started to wane. As I look back on it, I was so voracious because I…