It makes sense, right? The person that makes the first offer loses. Not always. In fact, the opposite can be true. Following are 5 things you need to know about negotiations that may give you an edge. 1. It can be advantageous to make the opening offer. Here’s what the experts say. First of all, most negotiations don’t start with an offer, they start with something far more important, which is each party’s position. There is some advantage to getting the other party to reveal

No matter how hard you try, there will always be clients that have legitimate (and not so legitimate) complaints that damage your relationship. Following are 4 steps for repairing the relationships that you truly value. 1. Listen and Apologize Start by asking a simple open-ended question, such as “How can I help you?” and then listen without interrupting. Once the client is finished, it’s time for a sincere apology. Remember that until the client has finished their story, a

There are a lot of perks to working from home that, if you’ve been doing it for a while you take for granted, these include taking walk the dog/pet the dog breaks, accepting deliveries, lunching locally with work friends, a quick nap with no interruptions, an occasional beer/glass of wine when things overheat—and (a nod to Don Draper) a movie break when you need to clear your head. One of the most important benefits for me is that I have zero travel time—which adds an hour or

Following are a few tips for making cold-calling less stressful (in order of effectiveness). 1. Commit to an amount of time, not a certain number of contacts. So instead of starting with a list of say 25 prospects to call, commit to an hour of cold-calling. This has the psychological effect of putting a cap on the anticipated stress. It also makes a negative response or two less likely to affect you and it will make you more likely to engage with a promising prospect (you are

What you’re going to read here are presentation tips you’ve probably never seen before. In essence, you’re going to learn the formula for making people listen. Yes, there is one and yes, it does work. Try it one time and you’ll see. Here are five messages (based on the advice of speaker extraordinaire Ed Wohlmuth) you need to convey to listeners in order to get their rapt attention. 1. I will not waste your time. Within the first few seconds of the presentation, you need t

There is a lot of info out there about choosing key terms for metatags and content and there are a lot of good tools to help you do that. The most important thing to keep in mind, though, is how your potential buyers are searching for what you are offering. As with many aspects of marketing, the sales team can be a huge help here—they almost always understand buyers better than anyone else at the organization. They are a good resource for choosing key terms and phrases. Note

It’s important to get periodic feedback from clients on what you are doing well, what you need to work on, and what the next performance goal should be. A five-minute conversation once a month should suffice. For most people, the very thought of this is terrorizing, but as with all analytics, the terror diminishes with frequency. Getting Past Fear of Feedback One of the biggest obstacles to excellence is fear of feedback. We’re afraid to know the truth for many reasons – ofte

Before you start planning a slew of projects for the year, revisit last year’s duds. A project that appears to be dead may be a prime candidate for revival. Make a list of projects that either you or someone else started, but never finished, last year and ask yourself these questions: Why did we drop the project? How far did it get? What’s changed since we dropped that project – company objectives, the competitive environment, project personnel, technology, etc.? What new

From the buyer's perspective, the brand is an insurance policy. A brand on a consumer product tells the buyer exactly what to expect – every time. But in B2B sales, buyers often don't know what they need, what’s available, or how it works. A reputable B2B brand, from the buyer's perspective, insures the buyer against risk before and after buying. From the B2B seller’s perspective, the basic purpose of a brand is to educate the potential buyer and reduce the impa

Albert Einstein said that if he had one hour to solve a problem he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. In fact, zeroing in on the right problem is so important that you could say a perfectly defined problem is not even a problem anymore. Consider this: A large municipal library had signs posted in its parking lot that said the lot was for library patrons only. Often, downtown shoppers ignored the signs – especially on week