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Many of the questions I’m receiving over the last week or so is “when is it appropriate to start selling to my customers?” The answer is right now! They need you now. Not in a week or two. They need your value today. They need your help. Don’t hurt them by keeping it from them.…

I was on the treadmill today with the TV on around the time of our stock market’s opening bell. As I flipped from one news channel to another, here are photos from my phone: The media loves a train wreck. The media loves to scare us. It brings eyeballs. And clicks. And it’s all about…

This piece is longer than my usual newsletters, but we are not in usual times. I hope you’ll find this useful.  First, be calm. Your customers are panicking. Your competition is panicking. But the world is not ending. It is being challenged. It is going through difficulty. And, eventually, things will normalize again. Eventually, the…

Now more than ever, it’s important to be present and predictable. Customers are under incredible stress. Just glance at the news:  the markets are falling, and the virus is spreading. We must be the island of peace in the stress storm our customers are operating in. See yourself this way. See yourself as calm and…

I just submitted a new book manuscript to my publisher Wiley. It comes out this summer. Because I run a busy consulting practice solo, I write these books quickly, and this period of time is intense. The client’s work and writing are the dominant activities. Not the selling. And then, once the writing is finished, I…

If you make a proactive phone call to a customer or prospect every once in a while — when you happen to think of it — each call is a snowflake that falls to the ground and melts. But if you make two proactive phone calls a day, you’re making more than 500 calls annually,…

As far as sales communications go, I think the text message gets a bad reputation. I find that a text message is a far better pathway for communicating with customers and prospects than sending an email, which is basically the same as doing nothing at all. Did the email arrive? I don’t know. But I…

Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots and one of the most successful coaches in the history of any sport, has a simple saying: Do your job. In football, the job is to be strong, be healthy, and know your assignment. You go to the weight room most days to get strong. You get treatment and…

How many times have you avoided something for weeks or months that ended up taking 10 or 15 minutes to do? Maybe it was calling the prospect. Maybe it was going to see the customer. Maybe it was finally — finally — sending that promotional piece. Stop reading right now and write down that one thing that…

I am shopping for additional disability insurance, and the local agency I work with here had me talk to their disability insurance specialist. For the first 10 minutes of the call, this guy talked without interruption. He would ask me questions and then answer them himself. He would take guesses about my situation without actually…