When you purchase a product from a company do you ever analyze how easy or hard the company makes the process to buy and receive their product.  You can have the best product in the world and the best sales people selling it but if you make the process of purchasing the product difficult you are going to see less sales.

Every element of the purchase and delivery of a product or service comes down to process.  It starts with the selling process, certain sales processes are very inefficient.  Have you ever been in a sales process where you have more meetings that are needed, poorly planned sales meetings and un-prepared sales people.  This is what I would call a poor sales process.  Read more...

I just got back from Disney World with my family and I wanted to share some of the differences of the Disney experience and why they do such a great job:  Read more...

1. All staff are upbeat and generally look like they are very happy working at their job, this makes it an enjoyable place for other employees to work and an enjoyable place to visit.
2. The customer is always right, I think they invented this concept, if anything is remotely wrong the staff will do everything in their power to make things right

When you engage a supplier to do work for you, generally you are engaging them because they have expertise that you do not have and it is less expensive to utilize their services than hire internally.  But how many times do you waste your time trying to do work that could be handled by your expert suppliers.  I look at our business, we are very knowledgeable about online marketing and we have the ability to consult with all our customers on various marketing and online marketing decisions.  Read more...

I have been to a few sales courses and networking events where the speaker mentions if you make connections for others they will return the favor and your business will grow.   When I heard that I thought no I have to concentrate on my connections and others can make their own.  Then I started watching a seasoned networker that has kind of taken me under his wing and that is exactly what he did.  He connected me to a lot of people and preached the good word about my business and my business grew.  Read more...

I recently attended a conference in Winnipeg called Centrallia.  The conference attracted companies from all over the world to connect and do business on a global basis.  Before the conference each company was able to choose 14 other companies they wanted to have a 30 minute meeting with.  Other companies chose your company to meet with as well.  During the conference our company got to meet with 14 companies for 30 minute meetings.

The conference went really well for our company and I started to think of the keys to make the most of these types of conferences:  Read more...

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a speech by Ken Blanchard at Centrallia.  He is a famous speaker and he had some interesting guidelines for business.  His philosophy is money does not mean everything and being  a good person in life is more important than any wealth that is achieved throughout one’s life.  Read more...

A sales driven organization starts from the top and works its way down.  Generally if a President or CEO is involved in sales they will have a better understanding of how important and effective it can be to be a sales driven organization.  Every job I have ever had has been focused on putting sales in front of other internal tasks.  Lets face it, sales is the life blood of your company.  Without sales the organization will slowly die.  Read more...

One of the questions we ask in our initial meeting with a prospective customer is how does your company differentiate yourself from the competition.  If a company has trouble answering this question this is a flag that they either have not thought about what they do good or they really do not offer anything better than the competition.  When I am choosing a company to deal with I look for what is different about this company.  Read more...