Greater Phoenix's Networking Events Calendar

When it comes to great sales and marketing strategies, there is a great deal of similarity to becoming a great fisherman.  For when it comes to fishing, more than anything else, the trick is knowing how to fish in the right waters, with the best lures, leveraging the latest knowledge, and utilizing the best techniques to land that prized fish.  Every great angler knows what it takes to catch a fish and they put that knowledge and skill – no luck involved – to land them. That is why they rarely go empty handed – they have a system they know works and they work it.

It is that time of year again.  Another year is coming to a close. No, they are not going by any faster -- there are still 24 hours in every day and 365 days in every year. You just have gotten to that point in your life where there is more on your mind, more to do, more to stress about, and more people demanding more.  It seems like the days blur together and the year flies by.  Same amount of time, same amount of days -- more pressure to do more in a limited, fixed amount of time.

The success of your business is dependent upon knowing what works, why it works, and what needs to be done to make certain that your successes are consistently and reliably repeated.  Most business owners struggle with this because they are not fully aware of all the little components of their success and they are often less in tune with the reasons for their lack of success (hint: despite what your salespeople tell you, it is almost never price!).

Even though every single sales training program emphasizes listening as the one of the single most important requirements for successful sales people, over 79% of the people surveyed comment that salespeople's greatest weakness is their poor listening skills.  Is it because they are so bad at listening that they don't learn that skill in sales school?  Or, is it that sales school simply doesn't know how to educate people on the art of listening.  While it is a combination of many factors, sales professionals teaching sales professionals how

We all need that one key component to grow our business is more customers.  After you have developed your sales strategy and focused clearly on your prospecting targets, the next step in the equation is getting busy selling.  Before I simply go out and promote my business, I define the tracking methodology (metrics)  that quantifies the activities that I need to engage in to be productive in the sales process. 

While doing my morning blog post review, I stumbled across this post "My Three Problems This Week." The first of the three problems resonated with me as something worth answering.  I thought I would share the highlights of the questions and my response with you.

We all have so many choices, challenges, opportunities, and distractions.  If we wanted to, we could probably attend or participate in something at least three times a day.  We are constantly being bombarded with emails from people pitching us products, events, services, and opportunities.  Our voice mail is trashed with customers requesting something, telemarketers selling stuff, and our friends and colleagues checking in with us.  How do we do it?  In the face of all this noise, how do we manage to get anything done? 

In a recent Sales Cooke blog post, I went on a mini-tirade about the true value of all your social media related connections.  The fundamental lesson of the post was that you cannot take your social media connections to the bank -- meaning social media connections do not equal increased revenues.  Whether our contacts are real or virtual the financial value of our contacts has absolutely nothing to do with the volume of our contact base.  The financial value of our contacts is directly conne

Every one of us has had a wide variety of experiences with creating and reaching goals.  Like you, I have had my share of successes and my failures.  Working with businesses and individuals in defining and accomplishing their goals, I have discovered there are five requisite foundations to every goal that make accomplishment repeatable and predictable. 

To make your goals more of a reality than a dream, here are five components that must exist in every single goal setting activity.

Nobody knows your business better than your customers.  Your customer is the one who utilizes your product, has met your sales team, interfaces with customer service, sends money to your accounts receivable person, and, hopefully, interacts with you, the owner, once in a while.  If anyone knows your business, it is your customer.  And, they know why they bought, why they still buy, and what you need to do to make them happier or serve them better.