I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
– Maya Angelou
Have you ever been on a call and heard the other person shuffling papers or talking to someone in the background?
How’d that make you feel? Continue reading →
Have you ever been in a sales meeting or on a prospecting call when someone throws a question at you that feels sharp or ambiguous? I’ll bet you have.
When that happens, it’s natural to feel obliged to respond on the spot. But giving an immediate answer to prickly questions puts you at a disadvantage, and an awkward reply can take the conversation in the wrong direction.
The best way to respond to prickly questions is to throw them back to the other person as if they just threw a porcupine at you — hence the sobriquet porcupine questions. Continue reading →
At the beginning of the 1994 movie Clear and Present Danger, the US Coast Guard has captured a couple of Colombian drug dealers who’ve commandeered a luxury yacht in the Caribbean and murdered the family on board. It turns out the yacht owner is a close friend of the President of the United States, so the CIA is brought in to investigate, and Jack Ryan is put in charge of the case.
As the investigation begins, Ryan is laying out the details for the assembled security heads and advisers. “What are you seeing here,” one of the advisers asks, “a hit on a respectable business man and his family?” Ryan casts a penetrating glance and replies, “You’re assuming he’s respectable.” Continue reading →
The word karma has become a familiar term in western culture over the last 50 years.
It’s often thought of as comeuppance, or the justice of the universe, but that’s not quite right. Karma basically refers to natural cause and effect. If you plant barley seeds, you can grow barley. If you plant wheat, you’ll get wheat.
And along with the right seeds, you need the right conditions — light, water, earth and nutrients – for the seeds to take root and grow. If these circumstances are absent, or out of balance, you won’t harvest any crops.
The same principles apply in the realm of sales. Continue reading →