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 a proposal, and then they ghost you 🤬. If you are seeing deals stall out toward the end of the sales process, you might need to add two more questions to your qualification process. Before investing time, I’m sure you confirm that they have a clear need, budget, and timeline. That’s common sales advice. But these two questions have helped the clients I coach to close … [Read more...]

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 the economy that was holding folks back. How can we do outreach when so many people are losing their jobs? The rate of infection is higher than ever, but people’s attitudes seem to have shifted again. We can’t hold off on selling forever, we need some new work, and our clients have things that they need. Let’s start doing some outreach again. If this is the position that you are in, … [Read more...]

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 it into a small consulting practice that might bring in $500K this year.  Another had spent years building a new product that is now ready to explode onto the market; if they can get the word out. A third has grown steadily, even this year, and was back in the office and ready to tackle the goals they set in January (six months later). A fourth saw her … [Read more...]

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 felt like a fraud; like I didn’t know what I was doing. If I could wave around ideas that came from these big thinkers then that might make people believe that I knew what I was doing.  It took a long time, but I finally realized that almost everyone was acting like they knew what they were doing, but most didn’t know any more than I did! Leading in a … [Read more...]

When you read that subject line, you knew the decision I was talking about. It might be to fire someone, or to hire someone, to start doing something that scares you or to stop doing something that bores you. Whatever it is, make that decision today. You can’t afford to carry around that kind of uncertainty any longer. I mean, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, economic depression, and social upheaval — what are you waiting for? But really, all joking aside, we all have decisions we need to make, and actions we need to take, but we’re hesitating. We’re afraid we’ll fail, or it all seems overwhelming and complicated, or, well, there’s a million excuses.  But I’m not joking about … [Read more...]

”Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life forever.” ~Amy Poehler For the last week, we’ve been talking about risk.  We talked about how difficult it will be to make a plan for the rest of 2020, about how we need some way to orient ourselves, some kind of routine or discipline that will propel us forward through the uncertainty that’s coming.  I’ve got an idea that might help make navigating that change more manageable.  Crossfit Now, before your eyes roll right out of your head — I’m not talking about you getting all sweaty, nor am I talking about the founder's tweets or comments, I'm talking about the … [Read more...]

We talked previously about the massive uncertainties that we’re facing in 2020 — unprecedented unemployment globally, a genuine public health threat, a presidential election year, and social change that we haven’t seen in a generation.  My recommendation was to narrow your focus, to pick one thing that you could do consistently and focus on doing that for the rest of 2020. By focusing on that one thing, you know you’ll be moving your business forward. What if you did this for your whole business? I know this is going to sound counter-intuitive — in a time when clients may be more cautious and less willing to engage, you need to narrow your focus and simplify your offerings.  What if … [Read more...]

We are in a world with massive uncertainty, and yet we need to run our business. How do we create a plan for the rest of 2020? The first thing I know is that it’s not going to be a plan like you made in January. We can’t just take last year, add 15%, target the same clients with the same services. With the economic, social, political, and public health instabilities we're experiencing we can’t count on the “same old, same old.“ In fact, I’m not sure there is any kind of rational way to set objective top-line goals for the rest of 2020 — there’s just too much we don’t know. But that leaves us in a pickle. If we don’t have goals, how do we measure progress? How do we orient ourselves … [Read more...]