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Sales

3 Leadership Lessons I Learned from Working in Food Service (That Business School Never Taught Me)

I’ve led teams large and small, and I’ve coached leaders in a huge variety of situations. The lessons I find myself drawing upon again and again, aren’t the things I learned in business school (Sorry, University of Georgia). They’re more frequently the timeless truths I learned earlier in my life,.

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How to Tell Someone They’re Wrong (And Not Have Them Hate You)

Early in my career, I worked in sales for a training company. At the end of the year, I was slated to present a big proposal to one of our customers. My presentation was full of new ideas and solutions for the upcoming year. I was pitching a robust.

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Why We’re Weird about Self-Promotion (And How to Get Over It)

A few weeks ago, I attended a professional development seminar. On the first day, the leader of the workshop asked the group – “How many people are guilty of underselling themselves?” 98% of the room raised their hand. Almost every single person in the room. Here’s the kicker: This.

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How to Avoid Alienating Customers When You Really Need the Sale

As organizations rush to make up for unprecedented declines in revenue during the pandemic, they’re keenly focused on shoring up their sales pipeline. Yet in their haste, businesses are at risk for alienating the very customers they need if their sales team takes the wrong approach.  Here are three.

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Why Your Problem Person is Still a Problem

He’s horrible; send him to training. How many times have you watched this scenario play out?  An employee is performing poorly.  Management gets frustrated.  They decide to send the person to training.  Clearly his behavior must be improved. Sending someone to training is certainly more humane than firing the.

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Naked Sales: It’s More Popular Than You Think

A friend of mine told me she hates salespeople. As part of her job, my friend has to buy large amounts of printing products.  I asked her, “How do you purchase the things you need to run your operation?  She said, “I don’t deal with the salespeople, I just.

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Why Case Studies Don’t Work and What to Do Instead

Do you want people to care about your cause, idea or product? A client of mine, we’ll call him Don, was struggling to get funding for his startup. He had a promising software product; he’d done a test market; he had the data.  People liked his presentation. Yet he.

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Is lack of business acumen costing you sales?

Three ways to help your team be more successful in the C suite Does this scenario sound familiar? Your salesperson finally gets an appointment with a senior executive in your biggest potential account.  The goal is to have a business conversation and better understand the customer’s key objectives. But.

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Are You Going to Stop the Buck, or Assign Blame?

The buck stops here. The famous sign on Harry Truman’s desk applies to all of us. At a certain point, we all have a buck stops here moment. Whether stepping up at work to fix a problem you inherited, or even harder, breaking the chain of pain in your.

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5 Steps for Creating a Noble Purpose Organization

When our firm first introduced Noble Purpose, we had a concept, but we weren’t very systematic in our methodology. It was more hit or miss, getting by where we could and figuring things out along the way with our clients. I’m grateful to those early adopters, with their help,.

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