In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, there was an interesting marketing article on Wheaties. Most of us grew up with the marketing tag line of "The Breakfast of Champions" ringing in our head along with pictures of Michael Jordan, Dorothy Hamil, Michael Phelps and similar top level athletes featured in full color on the outside of the box. Wheaties actually taste pretty good! The problem is that although they are an iconic 91 year old brand, they no longer sell very well.
Tags: sales productivity, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales enablement, sales effictiveness, sales boot camp
Recognition for this title to Seth Godin in his blog last Saturday. A Tufts grad, Seth has a knack for minimalism both in his blog content and in his persona. As I was reading his blog, immediately I thought of how important a statement this was for the sales people at most companies. And the reason for that are these disturbing facts below from a recent study at the Harvard Business School:
Tags: sales productivity, sales coaching, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales management boot camps
Now that we've settled into the actual competition of the Olympics and moved past the media distractions of uncompleted hotel rooms and relentless weather reports of melting snow, the pure athleticism in Sochi is just outstanding. World records and gold medals are decided in hundredths of a second after skiers and skeleton sleds plummet downhill at 80 miles an hour while hockey teams play repeated rounds of sudden death overtime. So far, this Olympics has been both exciting and heartwrenching (my snowboarding friend, Lindsey Jacobellis ,falling) to watch.
Tags: sales productivity, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales tools, selling skills, sales training, sales management boot camp
Last Sunday, I was walking out to the barn and noticed that the big red thermometer read 6. Just by it's naked self...6. Certainly a lot colder locations over the last couple of weeks. -31 in Fargo, -19 in Albany, and yesterday,-8 in Chicago, but here in the woods of Bondville-Winhall (pop. 725), it was just plain old 6 without the pluses or the minuses. Just so that I would keep my sanity as I shoveled yet another path for the propane delivery guy to get to the tank, I thought about the relevancy of the number 6.
Tags: sales coaching, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales management effectiveness, sales optomization, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp, sales checklists
30 years ago, during one of my "I think I will once again try to live in Vermont" sojourns, I remember working high on a mountain ridge one cold, wet fall morning pouring cement that we had laboriously carted up by buckets in ATVs for the footings on a microwave tower. It was November and long gone were the colorful fall leaves and smiling tourists visiting the antiques fair down in the postcard-pretty town Weston. It was back to the hardscrabble work of running a commercial masonry company building a series of towers all along the spine of Vermont. That November and December, we worked until the ground froze hard with most daybreaks spent chopping through the ice that had crusted over our water storage from the overnight freeze. It was during that period of what seemed to be a never-ending expedition of increasingly cold, wind-whipped, ugly, steel-gray days that I made a decision that I was moving back to Boston and would do everything I could to avoid November in Vermont.
Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity
A couple of times a week, I stop by Honovan's Cleaners to drop off laundry. Right around the corner, Honovan is the epitome of uber customer satisfaction. Open 12 hours a day, six days a week, she accommodates everything that I could possibly need.
I don't want to be bothered with tickets, so years ago, Honavan simply told me "no tickets". I don't want to wait in line. Simple solution for Honovan was to give me a laundry bag. I mentioned to her that I loved the fact that she opened, at 6:30 and then complained that the shoe repair store didn't open until 8. That day, Honovan became the drop off place for the shoe repair guy. Not satisfied with just laundry, shoes and, of course, alterations, a few years ago, she expanded to do the commercial laundry for many of the hotels in the Back Bay.
Tags: Sales Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, business plans, how to write a business plan
Spectacular fall weather for selling and marketing stuff which also helped both my mind and body in completing the annual "Vermont Big Clean" last weekend. Fueled by a small army of local high-school boys armed with rakes and a full array of mechanical things, we managed to clear out the summer gardens, rake up mountains of leaves and cut, split and stack a whole bunch of trees, bringing my theory of "a clean forest is a happy forest" to completion, once again. The picture above was taken up on the ridge in my woodlot after six trees were felled, sawed, hauled and split on Saturday morning. Everything, neat and tidy-kind of the way that I think about a good end to a Sales quarter:
Tags: sales coaching, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp
Fall is more than in the air in Vermont. It's in my aching back from last weekend's hauling, cutting and splitting three huge trees which fell in my woodlot as a result of the big blow two weeks ago. It's also been in my head all this week as a result of my unexpected discovery just before I left Vermont on Sunday of three more equally big trees that had fallen out of sight on the other side of the ridge. As a result, in my never-ending quest of "a clean forest is a happy forest", I'll find myself back in VT tomorrow, crack of dawn, up on the ridge, steam billowing from the tractor in the 40 degree air, the sound of the chainsaw ripping through the stillness and focused on "gettin' her done" since the seasons in VT and its inevitable snow wait for no one.
Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp
Living on the beach and in Boston, I see a fair amount of Mercedes' SMART cars. Cute, clean, fun, and head- turning, many SMART owners go on to accessorize their cars with their personal brands through vanity plates.
Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement
