You're Going To Be Great At This!

I recently had the pleasure of guesting on Dave Campbell's "Living The Next Chapter" podcast, which focuses on authors and their books. I had a great time talking about the writing process and my unique way of promoting them. When I was in the process of starting my podcast, I did a search on Spotify and discovered Dave's "How To Podcast" show, which I suggest to anyone considering starting a podcast. At the end of the episode, Dave mentioned that he had a meetup group and that they discussed the podcasting world.  I tuned in and immediately felt welcomed by the group. I learned a lot about the process, but more importantly, I met some great people who were also beginners, as well as others who were veteran podcasters. An interesting note about Dave is that he has 9 podcasts, and how he does it, I'll never figure out. But his knowledge and willingness to help others demonstrate what a good guy he is. Give it a listen and check out Dave's other podcas...

I was pretty surprised when I saw that my last blog post was several months ago. Time really does fly when you're having fun, or in my case, just having a busy workload. In the last few months I've been on the road for an approximate total of 9 weeks. Needless to say I get less than motivated to work in a hotel room after selling insurance for 8 hours, so blogging isn't on my "to do" list. While driving in my car during these trips I try to make my time productive my listening to podcasts on business and marketing. I'm not sure if someone was trying to tell me something but over the course of a week or so, I heard 4 episodes on how starting a podcast can help boost your business. After mulling this over and considering my options, I decided to take the plunge and start one myself. I've had a YouTube channel for a while which is fine, but I wanted to do something a little different. So I decided to start the "You're Going To Be Great At This!"...

Many of us who have been in sales and marketing for a while have been fortunate to have someone mentor us early on in our careers. The best mentors help us negotiate the potential roadblocks that could keep us from sales success. We lean on them because if we can learn from their mistakes, we won't make as many of our own. As I have said in the past, a good mentor should have no financial connection to your business. I'm not saying they can't, but the best possible scenario is one in which their income doesn't depend on your production, like a manager. And although they may be a good mentor, it's not ideal. When I first got into  door-to-door  selling insurance I didn't know what a mentor was. But there was a kindly older man who felt bad for me and the rest of our sales crew. He'd always say something like, "You're doin' good! Hang in there!"  This guy had been with the company for decades and was actually successful, despite a horrible st...

Let me start with saying that there are only two times when someone is okay using profanities. The first is if the "curser" is under 3 years of age. There's something oddly adorable about a toddler dropping f-bombs, especially when the parents of said child feign any knowledge of "where she heard that". Fun and cute at the same time. The other situation would be if the person using blue language is over the age of 85 and female. Hearing grandma threaten to "stomp a mudhole in your ass!" would make every kid laugh because they knew she wasn't that serious. This example is only made better by memories of my Greek grandmother watching professional wrestling and yelling at the TV.  Get your copy of "Nearly Motivated" here  https://tinyurl.com/3tp37psa In other than these two situations, keep the cursing to yourself, or your friend group. And maybe that group of guys from church you hang out with. But definitely keep it away from work and prof...

As an author of a book on sales I am asked to speak to groups of sales people. There are times, however, when I give a presentation to a civic group or some other kind of organization that isn't necessarily a sales group. For those I adapt my talk to let everyone in the audience know that they are, indeed, in sales. I will usually ask the audience who is in sales. A few hands go up. Then I ask who is not in sales and more hands are raised. That's when I break the bad news to them. They are in sales whether they think so or not. As the old adage goes, the first step is admitting you have a problem. It makes me want to put the audience's chairs in a circle and have a "sales intervention".  As discussed previously, we are all in sales in some form or fashion. Luckily,  basic sales techniques are easily transferable to other parts of our lives. Anyone who has tried to convince a coworker to try a different approach to a problem is in sales. Singles bars (are they stil...

In my first book I told the story of going on a call with my sales manager, Tom, who was obligated to observe each of the people on our crew every few weeks or so. Fortunately for me, the manager was pretty cool, even though he was a couple of years younger than myself. He had apparently gone to work for the insurance company not long after getting out of high school and had done well enough to get a small promotion. With that being said, these "ride alongs" weren't as horrible as I expected them to be. We'd usually take his car, which saved me gas money, because driving around in the middle of nowhere doing door-to-door sales could rack up a lot of miles and waste fuel. On our first stop Tom taught me an important lessons in sales. When making a sales call with a coworker, make sure that only one of you is doing the talking . The best way for this to succeed is to decide before going into through the door who will make the presentation.  If we decided that I was to g...