Ask the Experts

Whether you are new in your role as a director of sales, or sales manager, or fancy yourself as an “old hand,” at my company, we believe there are five important skills a sales leader should develop over time to be successful: Be engaged. As the leader of your team, you’ve got to be engaged

People can be difficult. Situations can be difficult. Relationships can be difficult. You can be difficult. While “difficult” is not typically on anyone’s to-do list for any given day, difficult conversations are likely to occur when we are leading, and aren’t we all leading in the way we think, act, speak and respond to others?

If you’ve been keeping up with this column, you may have noticed a theme: the fact that it’s never a bad idea to “get back to the basics” and constantly hone your skills in an ever-demanding business development environment. For many professional sellers, the concepts, and ideas, to which they regularly adhere have been refined

To fully address mental illness today you must talk about the stigma associated with it. Stigma has a profound impact on the lives of so many and their decisions about taking care of their mental health. A stigma is defined as a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality or person. The consequences

It’s true—tone and body language affect our interpretation of what is being said or shared. So, the words are skewed by the mood, as I like to say. Not ever, though, is a note, an email, a text, letter, announcement or instant message ever received in exactly the same time, mindset and energy that it

It’s the time of year when hope springs eternal, all 30 teams are undefeated, the weather is perpetually glorious and families are already thinking about summer vacation plans. It is an annual ritual for baseball players, and fans, dating back to the late 1800s, and, over all those decades, one thing remains constant: no matter

If you’re a sports fan, you already know that “March Madness” refers to the annual NCAA single-elimination college basketball tournament. The month of March also signifies the arrival of a new season, Major League Baseball’s spring training and the promise of warmer weather just around the corner. It’s worth noting people also have used March Madness to

In my last column, I covered the importance of knowing your numbers as a way to grow your business and make it more profitable. We explored the closing ratio. This month, we’ll look at two other key performance indicators, customer lifetime value and customer churn rate. Customer lifetime value, or CLV, is sometimes referred to

You get them—business emails, some you want, some you don’t, some you subscribe to and some that are spamming you. And you write them—business emails, some that people want and some they don’t. What’s the secret to making yours most welcomed and read? Have empathy and care in how you craft your emails. Yes, empathy

As Marcus Lemonis, the businessman and star of The Profit says, “If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.” Today, you will begin to know your business better. The Small business Administration states that only about 50% of small businesses make it to their fifth anniversary. There are several reasons for this,

While habits are not glamorous and are rarely highlighted, let alone celebrated, we are, at our core, a series of habits. We may think of habits as our personalities or “the way I am,” and yet habits are made, not born, and for this reason, with focus and discipline, you can make your habits what

Sales has traditionally been an intuition-driven profession: “What’s in your pipeline?  What do you think is going to close?” But these days, that approach puts companies and organizations at a major competitive disadvantage. In this data-driven era, sales leaders need to make decisions in response to real-world market changes, up-to-date assessments of the marketplace, accurate