I once owned a partnership in the Sheila Yeates; a gaff-rigged topsail ketch. She was a beautiful ship, 48 feet on the water line and 65 feet overall, built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and launched in 1976. The Sheila Yeats sank in the north Atlantic in 1989.
Read MoreClarity is your most powerful tool in sales and marketing. It confers sincerity, and sincerity, along with competence, builds trust.
Read MoreFor sales and marketing professionals, few of us have positions or jobs that are simply task-based. And doing even more tasks is a tough way to increase your personal productivity. We can also think of productivity as dependent on creativity. Yet creativity is the Chinese handcuffs of thinking. What can we do?
Read MoreYesterday, I had a colleague send me a link to a site that offers to write your blog for you. The price was very reasonable, an introductory offer of $68.75 per blog! He asked for my reaction.
Read MoreA lot of marketers and companies ask themselves if they should start blogging in order to generate leads. It’s the new conventional wisdom. So there are millions of business blogs. And there are thousands of marketing blogs, some great, but most very dusty.
I started the Prairie Sky blog as an experiment. I had some grandiose ideas, a few ulterior and selfish motives. I wanted to see if I could create 25 posts with a small investment of time. I wanted to test the conventional wisdom that you need a blog to generate traffic and leads. None of these turned out to be so important as I anticpated, and I keep asking myself, why I blog?
Read MoreSo, if you don’t make New Year’s resolutions, here is a list of items from my posts during the year that might make good subjects for reflection.
Read MoreI’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. The way I figure it, if you don’t have the discipline to decide to do something or not during the year, then a resolution is not going to help. Resolutions are mostly about things that weren’t important enough to begin with or we would have done them. Indeed, most of us abandon by February, what we resolved to do on January 1.
On the other hand, I do believe in spending time reflecting on your marketing, sales or personal plans…
Read MoreThe Trust Edge by David Horsager is a compelling look at how trust and lack of trust can impact an organization. Horsager turns what might be a soft skill into a hard skill by giving the reader conrete steps to build an organization basewd on trust.
Read MoreMany companies still rely on the “presentation” as a sales tool. But a couple recent studies may indicate a major problem with this approach.
Read MoreGroup dynamics in meetings and decisions are influenced by the social pressures of the group. You’ve heard the cynical old expression that the best decision of a committee is worse than the best decision of any one individual in the meeting. Here are some signs that you may have a problem and what you can do about them.
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