As a coach and consultant of entrepreneurs, owners and managers of sales organizations, I continue to be amazed at how little they know about how their sales people spend their time. When I ask managers the question, “where do your people spend their time”, the response I most often hear  is, “I don’t have a clue”.
Accountability is the most difficult and second most important job of a sales manager. Only …

Does the price you paid for that expensive wine at dinner influence your satisfaction with that wine? The answer to this question may reside in the folds of your medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. In what should be music to the ears of marketers, the old adage that you get what you pay for really is true when it comes to that most …

While you may not be able to implement all of these ten strategies, read each of them carefully and ponder how you might creatively use them in your business or practice.

1. Raise your current prices and fees

This is a no brainer and requires little skill. However, it does require a lot of  courage. The reality is that people will pay you more than you are …

In Sunday, April 6th’s issue of The Tennessean, the Nashville daily newspaper, David Bohan, founder of Bohan Advertising and Marketing, writes about the resurgence of direct response marketing.

In his article, Bohan points out that, contrary to popular belief, people actually look forward to reading their daily mail . He says, according to the U S Postal Service, consumers spend 30 minutes a day reading their mail.

Smart direct marketers are taking …

By Mike Dandridge

It was a joke, really. A sheet of eight and a half by eleven paper, probably a photocopy made at a customer’s office, that hung behind the sales counter for years. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a black-and-white sketch of three generic cartoon characters, their mouths wide open, doubled over, expressing hysterical comic-book-style laughter. Below the trio of chuckleheads the caption reads, You want it when?

Then one day, …

 This Blog post is from a Target Training International newsletter. Permission granted.
Hiring managers have all recounted this story or a similar version over and over again: “Our new hire had all the right experience, good references, and interviewed like a champ!  But here it is, six weeks later, and he’s just not working out.  We can’t ignore the fact that he’s simply wrong …

There are an endless number of marketing experts and business people who will line up to tell you how direct response marketing doesn’t work. Don‘t you fall for that line of faulty thinking because direct response marketing is alive and well.

A Real Example

As a direct response experiment, I recently wrote a 10 page sales letter and order form and used it at one of my day long seminars. With 10 …

Each year there are over 1,000,000 small businesses started in North America. 800,000 of these fail in the first five years. Of those 200,000 that make it past five years, 160,000 fail in the next five years says, Michael Gerber, the author of the E-Myth, one of my favorite business books, and one of the top 5 best selling business books of all time.

Recently, I participated in a conference …

I woke up thinking about what I am doing and why I am doing it. My mind would not let go of the question, “why are some people enormously successful while others seem to struggle to find clients.”  So I sit here at 2:55 am journaling my thoughts and sharing with you.

I don’t understand why selling is so hard for people, because it has never been hard for me. Obtaining clients has always …

In my consulting practice the hardest thing to get clients to do is to change their behavior. While they logically agree —at the intellectual level—that they need to change things they seldom make the significant changes that would propel their business forward.

Before you start thinking you are different you must realize that they are you and you are they.

A Universal Truth

The human organism is resistant to change. The body tries …