Generate Sales Quotes

When people say they don’t understand my generation, I like to point out that it’s not “my” generation. I’m only co-owner with a 50% stake.

So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion.

More often than not, that was a tough sell. If you go to a business and tell it you can save it $50,000 per year in labor costs if it eliminates this one job, then your AI product better eliminate that entire job. Instead, what entrepreneurs found was that their product was perhaps eliminating one task in a person’s job, and that wasn’t going to be enough to save their would-be customer any meaningful labor costs. The better pitches were ones that were not focused on replacement but on value. These pitches demonstrated how an AI product could allow businesses to generate more profits by, say, supplying higher quality products to their own customers. This had the benefit of not having to demonstrate that their AI could perform a particular task at a lower cost than a person. And if that also reduced internal resistance to adopting AI, then that only made their sales task easier. The point here is that a value-enhancing approach to AI, rather than a cost-savings approach, is more likely to find real traction for AI adoption.

The problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

Grade your performance as a copywriter on sales generated by your copy, not on originality.

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation.

Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression Having tinnitus. Scalding my hand on an oven, and having to have my hand in a strange ointment-filled glove for a week. Accidentally setting my leg on fire. Losing a job. Breaking a toe. Being in debt. Having a river flood our nice new house, causing ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage. Bad Amazon reviews. Getting the norovirus. Having to be circumcised when I was eleven. Lower-back pain. Having a blackboard fall on me. Irritable bowel syndrome. Being a street away from a terrorist attack. Eczema. Living in Hull in January. Relationship break-ups. Working in a cabbage-packing warehouse. Working in media sales (okay, that came close). Consuming a poisoned prawn. Three-day migraines.

the true power of technology in marketing is relationship building.

I’m looking for a full-time portable heat generator. Must be willing to travel. If you don’t snuggle, you must cuddle—at a world champion level.

The sales assistant looks at Jimmy with a sort of twitching around his eyes that Ove seems adept at generating in people with whom he comes into contact. This is so frequent that one could possibly name a syndrome after him.

As early as 1,000 BC, man had to wait nearly 3,000 years to talk to me. And my first words to the world right out of the womb were: “Love is timeless, but man is not. I think I’m early.” It’s true. I was a premature baby. I was born generations before my time.

What’s our market share? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.

Sólo el individuo que vive en soledad es una criatura sujeta a leyes profundas y si sale al empezar la mañana, o mira hacia la tarde que está vibrante de vida y comprende lo que le rodea, entonces todo se desprende de él, como si de un cadáver se tratara, aunque siga en la plenitud de la vida.

So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the value of that bit of paper; but as much as I love freedom, I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belong to him or his.

ON A COLD CALL: Be brief. You must generate interest in about 30 seconds or less, or forget it. Make a strong statement about how you can help the prospect. Don't focus on how much money you can save them. That approach seems to be wearing thin. Talk about what you do for companies like hers, or how your product has worked for others.

The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere ulh, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material’. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.

I want instant coffee at the snap of my fingers that gives me more energy than that generated by a million snaps.

In your emails, instead of just writing about your topics, tell a story that illustrates your points.

it’s also about helping member companies generate the sort of “social demand” they need in order to avoid the perception that the training is just another top-down mandate.

When you care about helping other people generate the results that they can’t generate without you, your outward focus is part of what creates a preference and makes you easier to buy from.

An author must comprehend that their purpose is not to write for sales or reviews but to motivate individuals and the upcoming generation. Sales and everything else will follow when the vision is kept in focus.

Attention deficit is no longer the supposed domain of Generation Y’s who were brought up on a diet of social media and new technology. A recent study revealed 65 percent of 55-64 year olds surf, text and watch television simultaneously.

Although Sony would go on to sell ten million PlayStation systems by the end of 1996 (with more than half of those sales occurring in the United States), most of SCEA’s key executives would be fired or let go within a year of the launch.

The new government decided the best way to rectify this was to outlaw abortion and prohibit the sale or display of contraceptives in the Weimar constitution of 1919. During a time of unimaginable scarcity and fear, women were forced into motherhood. They were forced to make do, and the pressure to repopulate the nation, to birth and raise a new generation of mothers and soldiers, was enormous. It was the most important thing a woman could possibly do: Be the Good Mother.

Eng8ge is a web marketing services company in Singapore. We help SMEs connect with their customers online, thereby generating more sales opportunities, leading to higher revenue. Our core services comprise web design, GMB optimisation, social media management, PPC advertising, SEO, and online content writing - collectively known as Online Presence Managed Services. Being managed services, customers needn't worry about on-going support and maintenance as we'll take care of them.

Remember this study when you are in a negotiation—make your initial request far too high. You have to start somewhere, and your initial decision or calculation greatly influences all the choices that follow, cascading out, each tethered to the anchors set before. Many of the choices you make every day are reruns of past decisions; as if traveling channels dug into a dirt road by a wagon train of selections, you follow the path created by your former self. External anchors, like prices before a sale or ridiculous requests, are obvious and can be avoided. Internal, self-generated anchors, are not so easy to bypass. You visit the same circuit of Web sites every day, eat basically the same few breakfasts. When it comes time to buy new cat food or take your car in for repairs, you have old favorites. Come election time, you pretty much already know who will and will not get your vote. These choices, so predictable—ask yourself what drives them. Are old anchors controlling your current decisions?

Yes. It very much is. Especially if things are run by a bunch of old people who think the generation after them is full of a bunch of lazy, directionless kids. “Funny—they broke the world and created the problem, and somehow we’re supposed to fix it for them.

http://www.touchofireland.co/ have many shopping stores which contain all the things which are needed in daily purpose or uses .there are plenty of categories of products and items and we have made some changes in categories as per the current generation demand.

The railway station provided them all that they needed: flatulence-generating food, tea, water, paan, shelter, electricity, social intercourse, seating, mucky toilets—and drugs, coolies, women and children for sale at most reasonable prices. What more could a man ask for?

We are entering a world where we are going back to a pre–Industrial Revolution, craftsmanlike experience. A small group of people who understand engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and design are going to be able to manage armies of generative AI and put all of these pieces together.

Ralph Lauren generates a huge portion of its sales from seconds and job lots sold at the many Polo factory stores around the country. There are so many of these stores (and the demand is so high) that many of the items sold aren’t seconds at all. They’re designed and produced for the factory stores. People tell themselves a story about finding a bargain, they build up the expectation by driving thirty miles out of their way (while on vacation, no less) and then are delighted to spend $40 for a $400 jacket that was never intended to be sold for $400 and probably cost $4 to make.

The Century of the Self delineated expertly how the theories of Sigmund Freud were deployed by his nephew Edward Bernays to create the profession of PR and generate the consumer boom of the fifties. Prior to the inclusion of psychological principles in sales, products were sold on the basis of utility:

Living in the age of the Internet and being a part of the information generation, we have unlimited access to an unprecedented wealth of knowledge and learning. We have no excuse to show up to an appointment, a sales call, a date, or an important meeting without learning everything we can to tip the odds in our favor.

Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers' struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Bad teams gather requirements from sales and customers.

When, in a generation or so, a radioactive cigar-smoking child, picnicking on Saturn, asks you what the Beatles affair was all about – ‘Did you actually know them?’ – don’t try to explain all about the long hair and screams. Just play the child a few tracks from this album and he’ll probably understand what it is all about. The kids of AD 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of well being and warmth as we do today. For the magic of the Beatles, is I suspect, timeless and ageless. It has broken all frontiers and barriers. It has cut through differences of race, age and class. It is adored by the world. Derek Taylor, sleeve notes for the Beatles For Sale album, 1964

Three Keys To Predictable Revenue Building a Sales Machine that creates ongoing, predictable revenue takes: Predictable Lead Generation, the most important thing for creating predictable revenue. A Sales Development Team that bridges the chasm between marketing and sales. Consistent Sales Systems, because without consistency you have no predictability.

1. No cold calling. Ever. You should attempt to sell only to warm leads. 2. Before you try to sell anything, you must know how much you’re willing to pay to get a new customer. 3. A prospect who “finds” you first is more likely to buy from you than if you find him. 4. You will dramatically enhance your credibility as a salesperson by authoring, speaking, and publishing quality information. 5. Generate leads with information about solving problems, not information about the product itself. 6. You can attain the best negotiating position with customers only when your marketing generates “deal flow” that exceeds your capacity. 7. The most valuable asset you can own is a well-maintained customer database, because people who’ve already bought from you are way easier to sell to than strangers.

What works to generate flows of new leads: Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Cold Calling 2.0: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in awhile, it generates actual results!

This book exposes the ways in which food companies use political processes—entirely conventional and nearly always legal—to obtain government and professional support for the sale of their products. Its twofold purpose is to illuminate the extent to which the food industry determines what people eat and to generate much wider discussion of the food industry’s marketing methods and use of the political system.

I grew up in a swamp. All who visit see the savage beauty of the place. Those who stay see more. A deep connection. Roots that have grown together for generations. Once as a teen I went with family to a fish fry and sing at Scrub Creek Baptist Church off County Road 351. There a teen girl was very friendly until told to stop. We were cousins. She stomped away – "Is everyone here my DAMN cousin?!" Yes, and we are blessed.

Interruption Marketing was easy. Build a few ads, run them everywhere. Interruption Marketing was scalable. If you need more sales, buy more ads. Interruption Marketing was predictable. With experience, a mass marketer could tell how many dollars in revenue one more dollar in ad spending would generate. Interruption Marketing fit the command and control bias of big companies. It was totally controlled by the advertiser, with no weird side effects.

Only one thing, in those years, drew from her a cry of fury. This was the publication, in 1563, of a single, stout book. It was known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; and it was an astonishing feat of propaganda. For this book, carefully written to evoke every man’s pity and rage, described in detail the martyrs of England – by which it meant those Protestants who had perished under Bloody Mary. Of the Catholics who had suffered martyrdom before then, it said not a word. That some of these Protestants, like vicious old Latimer, had been burners and torturers themselves, it conveniently forgot. The sale of the book was prodigious. Soon, it seemed, only Catholic persecution of Protestants had ever existed. “ ’Tis a lie,” Susan would protest. “And I fear it will persist.” It would indeed. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was destined to be read in families, to give warning to children, and to shape English people’s perception of the Catholic Church for generations.

In the decade to 2011, the world’s largest oil, metal and agricultural trading houses – Vitol, Glencore and Cargill, respectively – enjoyed a combined net income of $76.3 billion (see table on page 332). That was an astonishing amount of money. It was ten times the profits the traders were generating in the 1990s.16 It was more than either Apple or Coca-Cola made over the same period.17 And it would have been enough money to buy entire titans of corporate America, such as Boeing or Goldman Sachs.18

Our Difficulty in Believing in Providence The first obstacle is that, as long as we have not experienced concretely the fidelity of Divine Providence to provide for our essential needs, we have difficulty believing in it and we abandon it. We have hard heads, the words of Jesus do not suffice for us, we want to see at least a little in order to believe! Well, we do not see it operating around us in a clear manner. How, then, are we to experience it? It is important to know one thing: We cannot experience this support from God unless we leave Him the necessary space in which He can express Himself. I would like to make a comparison. As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out into the void, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. And so it is in spiritual life: “God gives in the measure that we expect of Him,” says Saint John of the Cross. And Saint Francis de Sales says: “The measure of Divine Providence acting on us is the degree of confidence that we have in it.” This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken the leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God. The founders of religious orders proceed with the audacity of this spirit of faith. They buy houses without having a penny, they receive the poor although they have nothing with which to feed them. Then, God performs miracles for them. The checks arrive and the granaries are filled. But, too often, generations later, everything is planned, calculated. One doesn’t incur an expense without being sure in advance to have enough to cover it. How can Providence manifest itself? And the same is true in the spiritual life. If a priest drafts all his sermons and his talks, down to the least comma, in order to be sure that he does not find himself wanting before his audience, and never has the audacity to begin preaching with a prayer and confidence in God as his only preparation, how can he have this beautiful experience of the Holy Spirit, Who speaks through his mouth? Does the Gospel not say, …do not worry about how to speak or what you should say; for what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it will not be you who will be speaking, but the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you (Matthew 10:19)? Let us be very clear. Obviously we do not want to say that it is a bad thing to be able to anticipate things, to develop a budget or prepare one’s homilies. Our natural abilities are also instruments in the hands of Providence! But everything depends on the spirit in which we do things. We must clearly understand that there is an enormous difference in attitude of heart between one, who in fear of finding himself wanting because he does not believe in the intervention of God on behalf of those who lean on Him, programs everything in advance to the smallest detail and does not undertake anything except in the exact measure of its actual possibilities, and one who certainly undertakes legitimate things, but who abandons himself with confidence in God to provide all that is asked of him and who thus surpasses his own possibilities. And that which God demands of us always goes beyond our natural human possibilities!

We come in peace. We don’t have imperial ambitions. We aren’t trying to dominate an industry or a market. We wish everyone well. To get ours, we don’t need to take theirs. What’s our market share? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.

Heart Speaks Unto Heart. This motto of the Blessed John Henry Newman, adopted from St Francis de Sales, contains the essence of a ‘philosophy of communication,’ which is also a philosophy of education. If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2

Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.

No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.

going on. Models had always been different each year, but consistently solid and square, usually black or dark green. Suddenly a completely new generation was on gleaming display – wider and softer than ever. I’ve looked at the advertisements for that year. The earthy colours of previous decades were replaced by pastels, pinks and pale blues. The Chevrolet Bel Air and the Pontiac Star Chief, with their Strato-Streak V8 engines, were available in ‘Avalon Yellow’ as well as ‘Raven Black’. The new models had rounded, panoramic windscreens and, in the case of the new Cadillac, a strange rear end with tail fins like a fighter plane. Sales soared, rising by thirty-seven per cent between 1954 and 1955 alone. People were no longer so concerned about technology and durability; it was more

How does this work in email marketing? One simple example is to start asking subscribers to begin interacting with you in a small way right from when you start communicating with them. Ask them to reply to a message, like or share a blog post, complete a survey. Taking these small steps to interact early on makes it much more likely they’ll be willing to take bigger steps later – like joining you on a webinar, arranging a call with you or buying a product. You can also offer a low cost product early on in your interactions with a subscriber. It’s less of a commitment than a high end product or hiring your services. But by purchasing from you they begin to see themselves as a buyer and they’re more likely to buy again in future. Especially if their buying and post-purchase experience is very positive.

What works to generate flows of new leads: Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Outbound Prospecting (aka "Cold Calling 2.0"):: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in a while, it generates actual results!

While advertising was once used primarily to create a sale or enhance an image, it must now be used to create awareness about Web content. • While SEO was at one time primarily a function of optimizing a Web site, it must now be a function of optimizing brand assets across social media. • While lead generation used to consist of broadcasting messages, it must now rely heavily on being found in the right place at the right time. • While lead conversion in the past often consisted of multiple sales calls to supply information, it must now supplement Web information gathering with value delivery. • While referrals used to be a simple matter of passing a name, they now rely heavily on an organization’s online reputation, ratings, and reviews. • While physical store location has always mattered, online location for the local business has become a life-and-death matter.

Kids are spending so much time communicating through technology, they're not developing basic communication skills that humans have used since forever,' says psychologist Jim Taylor, author of Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World. "Communication is not just about words. It's about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheremones, all of which can't be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes." And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.

Credit must be given where credit is due. European culture’s politicoeconomic system is wholly at fault for the importation of weapons into our communities. We neither own nor operate any of the 922 gun manufacturers who, in this society alone, produce over 1.5 million legal handguns for sale each year. We had nothing to do with the 250 million handguns already legally in circulation. No, they do not force our youth to buy guns. But their cultural imperative of violence has created and socializes them into an atmosphere where fear begets violence and violence begets more fear and more violence, and the methods and tools for quelling those confrontations become an increasingly more destructive interpersonal arms race. Europeans know that the death of a young Afrikan male is not simply his death. It is also the murder of every coming, exponentially growing generation of Afrikans he was placed here to begin the procreation of. There

The tone of those negotiations was very contentious,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who served on the national team’s CBA committee and participated in most of the negotiation sessions. “They didn’t go anywhere. We would go into those meetings and say we want equal pay and they would say you’re not really generating the revenue to deserve equal pay to the men. And it just went around and around like that.” But then on March 7, Rich Nichols saw something that caught him by surprise. It was an article by Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer that broke down financial numbers contained in U.S. Soccer’s General Annual Meeting report. The report itself was released quietly on U.S. Soccer’s website without fanfare—Tannenwald was the only journalist for a major newspaper who picked up on it. What the U.S. Soccer report showed—and what in turn the Philadelphia Inquirer explained—was that U.S. Soccer initially budgeted a $420,000 loss for 2016 but changed their numbers to expect a profit of almost $18 million, based largely on the gate receipts and merchandise sales of the women’s national team during the 2015 Women’s World Cup victory tour.

The explosion of government and spending under Obama insured that while the rest of the nation continued to suffer stagnant job growth and slow housing sales long past the time when a recovery should have been underway, one city was booming like a five-year-long Led Zeppelin drum solo: Washington, D.C. According to the 2014 Forbes ranking of the ten richest counties in America, none were in New York, California, or Texas. Before Obama took office, five of the richest counties surrounded Washington, D.C. Now, seven years after Obama took office on his promise to rid the place of big money lobbyists, and Democrats assumed complete control of the White House and Congress for two years, six of the richest counties surround Washington, D.C. Bear in mind that unlike Texas or California, where money is generated by creating products people actually need, such as oil or computers, Washington, D.C., produces nothing but government. In other words, six of the ten richest counties in America got that rich by being parasites. A case could be made that under the current leadership, crony capitalism is more rewarding than actual capitalism. And with all that government around business people’s necks, it’s certainly a heckuva lot easier.

FOCUS ON GENERATING REVENUE THE DOJ FOUND THAT virtually every branch and tributary of the city’s bureaucracy—the mayor, city council, city manager, finance director, municipal court judge, municipal court prosecutor, court clerk, assistant clerks, police chief—all were enmeshed in an unending race to raise revenue through municipal fines and fees:            City officials routinely urge Chief [Tom] Jackson to generate more revenue through enforcement. In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief Jackson that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.” Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD [police department] could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.” The importance of focusing on revenue generation is communicated to FPD officers. Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership. The evidence we reviewed supports this perception.

The Iran/Contra cover-up The major elements of the Iran/Contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal Contra war run out of Ollie North’s White House office were connected. The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran—you could read it on the front page of the New York Times. In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/Contra hearings appeared on BBC television [the British Broadcasting Company, Britain’s national broadcasting service] and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime, “with the cooperation of the United States…at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah—standard operating procedure. As for the Contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way. So what finally generated the Iran/Contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the Contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged. We then move to the next phase: damage control. That’s what the follow-up was about. For more on all of this, see my Fateful Triangle (1983), Turning the Tide (1985), and Culture of Terrorism (1987).

Cultivating loyalty is a tricky business. It requires maintaining a rigorous level of consistency while constantly adding newness and a little surprise—freshening the guest experience without changing its core identity.” Lifetime Network Value Concerns about brand fickleness in the new generation of customers can be troubling partly because the idea of lifetime customer value has been such a cornerstone of business for so long. But while you’re fretting over the occasional straying of a customer due to how easy it is to switch brands today, don’t overlook a more important positive change in today’s landscape: the extent to which social media and Internet reviews have amplified the reach of customers’ word-of-mouth. Never before have customers enjoyed such powerful platforms to share and broadcast their opinions of products and services. This is true today of every generation—even some Silent Generation customers share on Facebook and post reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. But millennials, thanks to their lifetime of technology use and their growing buying power, perhaps make the best, most active spokespeople a company can have. Boston Consulting Group, with grand understatement, says that “the vast majority” of millennials report socially sharing and promoting their brand preferences. Millennials are talking about your business when they’re considering making a purchase, awaiting assistance, trying something on, paying for it and when they get home. If, for example, you own a restaurant, the value of a single guest today goes further than the amount of the check. The added value comes from a process that Chef O’Connell calls competitive dining, the phenomenon of guests “comparing and rating dishes, photographing everything they eat, and tweeting and emailing the details of all their dining adventures.” It’s easy to underestimate the commercial power that today’s younger customers have, particularly when the network value of these buyers doesn’t immediately translate into sales. Be careful not to sell their potential short and let that assumption drive you headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember that younger customers are experimenting right now as they begin to form preferences they may keep for a lifetime. And whether their proverbial Winstons will taste good to them in the future depends on what they taste like presently.

The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.

List Segmentation to Increase Response You can also use list segmentation to increase your response in a number of ways. For example: Emailing subscribers based in a specific geographic area when you’re running a live event. Making a special offer to subscribers who visited a sales or checkout page but didn’t complete the transaction. Emailing offers of related products to subscribers based on previous purchases, or on age, sex or other demographics. Emailing a one-to-one session offer to subscribers who’ve recently started browsing your site more or opening and clicking more emails.

We can also increase the perceived long term value by the way we describe our emails. Nowadays many businesses mention a newsletter on their website, but the phrase ‘newsletter’ doesn’t have any implied value in it. In fact the word ‘news’ is probably something you don’t want to hear from a potential supplier. Who cares whether Mary in accounts has had a birthday? What you would like to get is useful, valuable information. So instead of calling it an email newsletter, I call mine ‘client winning tips via email’. Or you could call it a ‘divorce survival bulletin’. Or ‘the cash flow accelerator emails’ or ‘tax cutting tips’. Each of these names implies some kind of value or outcome your potential subscribers will get from your emails. To come up with a good name, go back to your customer insight map for your ideal clients and look at the big problems, challenges, goals and aspirations your clients have. If you can name your emails to relate to those big goals and problems then they’re likely to see they’ll get value by subscribing to them.

One current trend is to offer “free registration” to get access to resources rather than “subscribing” to emails. This is taking advantage of the fact that most web users are used to registering for services they find valuable. The more your opt-in process looks like something they’ve done a dozen times before, like signing up for Facebook or Twitter or for a free account with an online app or webmail service, then the more natural it will seem to do so with you too. Using this type of registration approach you’d put your lead magnet and other free resources into a private membership site that subscribers get access to by signing up. This feeling of exclusive access and similarity with other online services may well result in increased sign up rates. Right now it’s too early to tell, but a number of big online marketers like Copyblogger are going down this route.

The first speed bump is often a good topic for a lead magnet because many potential clients get stuck at that first hurdle. By helping them get quick results with that initial problem, you’ll give them the confidence to work with you on bigger issues.

Once you’ve got your topic for a lead magnet you then have to make sure that people can see that the topic is going to be valuable to them. It needs to be clear from the name and the description of the lead magnet that they’ll get immediate value.

Directing visitors from pay-per-click advertising to your home page is one of the most basic errors and wastes of money in online marketing.

Pulling out something surprising about the topic or disagreeing with conventional wisdom. E.g. Why improving your selling skills will lose you sales. Adding some form of quantification or ranking. E.g. The top 3 reasons you’re losing sales. In this case curiosity is aroused because subscribers want to find out what you think are the top 3 reasons and whether they agree with what they’d have picked. Harnessing an emotion. E.g. 7 ways big corporates try to stop you succeeding. In this case tapping in to potential anger and suspicion about large corporates. Linking the topic to something unexpected. E.g. What Jeremy Clarkson taught me about marketing. The curiosity is in wanting to know what a TV celebrity could know about a topic they’re not usually associated with. Hooking in to news and current affairs. E.g. How to achieve Olympic performance in your organisation. Health warning: these can often go stale fast, especially if lots of people make the same analogies. If you’re linking to the news, try to make it a less common story. Name drop a known expert in your field. E.g. David Ogilvy’s best performing adverts. People are curious to see behind the scenes of what a well-known industry expert thinks and does. Admit your mistakes. E.g. My WORST sales meeting ever. A mixture of wanting to know what to avoid themselves and a little schadenfreude at hearing what you did wrong means these emails often get a very high open rate.

The How To Model How to How to even if How to in less than The Surprising Link Model What I learned about from ’s guide to The List Model ways to surprising facts about The top reasons you’re The Secrets Model secret ways to What your doesn’t want you to know about The Questions Model What would happen if you ? Has ever happened to you? Do you know the top reason why ? The Unusual Sentence Model “” (e.g. “You’re fired, Mr Peesker”) (e.g. Dripping blood, sponges and something that may be holding you back)

Many surveys have been done on email frequency with respondents regularly saying that one of the main reasons they unsubscribe from emails is that they get sent too many. The data, however, tells a different story. When Zarrella looked at unsubscribe rates and click rates for different frequencies of emails he found that: Unsubscribe rates were higher for less frequently emailed lists than frequently mailed ones (rates falling from 0.7% for lists emailed once a month to 0.15% for lists mailed daily) Click rates decreased very little as email frequency increased, going down from around 6% per email for lists mailed once or twice per month to 5% per email for those emailed daily. And since the rate is per email, the daily emails generated over 20 times as many clicks overall. Zarrella’s conclusion was that “sending more email is not the marketing taboo many of us had thought it to be. As long as you’re following the guidelines set forth in the rest of this chapter and sending targeted, personalized and value-packed emails, sending more of them is better”.

Summary The key to getting subscribers to open and read your email lies in five main factors: Making sure your emails get through spam and greymail filters by keeping them on topic and high value. Quickly establishing a reputation for sending valuable, entertaining emails that your subscribers want to read so that opening your emails becomes a habit. Using subject lines which promise benefits and invoke curiosity and following that up in the first few lines of the email. Making sure your emails look easy to read across all devices. Sending your emails when your subscribers are likely to have less in their inbox.

By contrast, if they are engaging with your emails and acting on them, then when you ask them to take a bigger action they’re much more ready to take that step because they’ve already taken smaller steps and they’ve had good results from taking those smaller steps.

Szot changed the all-too-familiar call-to-action line, “Operators are waiting, please call now,” to, “If operators are busy, please call again.” On the face of it, the change appears foolhardy. After all, the message seems to convey that potential customers might have to waste their time dialing and redialing the toll-free number until they finally reach a sales representative. Yet, that surface view underestimates the power of the principle of social proof: When people are uncertain about a course of action, they tend to look outside themselves and to other people around them to guide their decisions and actions. In the Colleen Szot example, consider the kind of mental image likely to be generated when you hear “operators are waiting”: scores of bored phone representatives filing their nails, clipping their coupons, or twiddling their thumbs while they wait by their silent telephones—an image indicative of low demand and poor sales.

Slack had spent nearly five years and $ 17 million on development prior to its public launch in February 2014. Just two months later, before the end of April, it had raised another $ 43 million. Both of these investments took place before Slack had proven its revenue model and started generating significant sales. Slack’s freemium business model (offering a free service and encouraging users to upgrade later to becoming paying customers) meant that even after two months of rapid user growth, the company hadn’t proven its ability to make money. Fortunately for Slack and its investors, this aggressiveness paid off. As the initial wave of free users started converting to paid, Slack was able to raise an additional $ 120 million six months later to accelerate its growth even further.

What works to generate flows of new leads:

When you have a thought, a signal is created in your brain that chemically creates a corresponding emotion. The emotion drives you to take some action or another, which generates a corresponding result. Therefore, your emotions and actions (which create your results) are a reflection of your thoughts.

As Aaron Levie, the founder of the online file storage company Box noted in a tweet in 2014, “Sizing the market for a disruptor based on an incumbent’s market is like sizing a car industry off how many horses there were in 1910.” The other factor that can lead to underestimating a market is neglecting to account for expanding into additional markets. Amazon began as Amazon Books, the “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” But Jeff Bezos always intended for bookselling to serve as a beachhead from which Amazon could expand outward to encompass his massive vision of “the everything store.” Today, Amazon dominates the bookselling industry, but thanks to relentless market expansion, book sales represent less than 7 percent of Amazon’s total sales. The same effect can be seen in the financial results of Apple. In the first quarter of 2017, Apple generated $ 7.2 billion from the sale of personal computers, a category the company pioneered and once dominated. That’s a great number to be sure, but, over that same financial quarter, Apple’s total revenue was a whopping $ 78.4 billion, which meant that Apple’s original market accounted for less than 10 percent of its total sales.

Free” has an incredible power that no other pricing does. The Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely wrote about the power of free in his excellent book Predictably Irrational, describing an experiment in which he offered research subjects the choice of a Lindt chocolate truffle for 15 cents or a Hershey’s Kiss for a mere penny. Nearly three-fourths of the subjects chose the premium truffle rather than the humble Kiss. But when Ariely changed the pricing so that the truffle cost 14 cents and the Kiss was free—the same price differential—more than two-thirds of the subjects chose the inferior (but free) Kisses. The incredible power of free makes it a valuable tool for distribution and virality. It also plays an important role in jump-starting network effects by helping a product achieve the critical mass of users that is required for those effects to kick in. At LinkedIn, we knew that our basic accounts had to be free if we wanted to get to the million users we theorized represented critical mass. Sometimes you can offer a product for free and still be profitable; in the advertising-driven business model, a large enough mass of free users can be valuable even if they never pay for your service. Facebook, for example, doesn’t charge its users a dime, but it is able to generate large amounts of high-gross-margin revenue by selling targeted advertising. But sometimes a product doesn’t lend itself to the advertising model, as is the case with many services used by students and educators. Without third-party revenue, the problem with offering your product to users for free is that you can’t offset your lack of sales by “making it up in volume.

Customers or shoppers, they love buying as much as they want without thinking about going out of cash. The thought of scarcity of funds annoys them to the core and often spoils their made to a point where they no longer are interested in making the purchase. Though this doesn’t harm them in anyway because they can buy the needed product/service later but this changed attitude of them costs high to the business that loses a valuable customer and an important sale. Credit Card Processing: Never Lose Upon A Consumer If you are limited to the traditional era of accepting cash, the above explained scenario can become a reality for you if not today then tomorrow. However, to stay away from this disappointment, credit card processing can be used to the fullest extent. As shoppers are interested in paying via credit card, a business can entice them by accepting card payment. Talking exclusively about the small businesses that are particular about everything, pulling impressive customers through credit card processing for small business totally makes sense. Not only it appeals to the needs of the customers but also lets the business stay active 24/7. In other words, sales remain on without any break and revenue can be generated even when official business hours are closed. Benefits To Catch Up With • Boost in sales • Encouraging customers for impulse buying • Legitimizing the business • Improvement in cash flow • No risk of dealing with bad checks • Inexpensive business expense • Getting started is quick & easy • Multiple currencies can be accepted • Needs of customers can be catered no matter where they are located These advantages are seriously wonderful to take a small business forward and give it the needed recognition on global level. Accepting cash payment is soon going to become thing of the past as credit card processing and mobile payment processing are the new mates businesses are interested in joining hands with. Hence, start with these services before your customers find comfort in arms of your competitor’s business.

A study from InsideSales.com, published in the Harvard Business Review, found that waiting five minutes to respond to a new lead resulted in a 10x drop in the likelihood of being able to connect and follow up with that lead. After ten minutes, there’s a 400% drop in the odds of qualifying the lead. In other words, the longer you wait to respond after someone reaches out, the less likely it is that that person will convert. And for best results, companies should be staying below the five-minute mark.

Most businesses hustle to create revenue, pay out their various expenses, and with any luck, there’s a little profit left over for the owners.  Here’s what you’re probably learning in business school: Revenue minus expenses equals profits.  Sounds sensible, right?”  He paused for the group of nodding heads.  “Well, it’s not!  It is completely backwards.  It should be taught:  Revenue minus PROFITS equal expenses.” Our chaperoning professors did their best to hide their cloudy faces, but it was clear Mr. X didn’t mind offending them.  “Don’t wait to see if there’s anything left over for a profit.  By carving out a margin before you address expenses, you create a constraint on the resources available.  This constraint unlocks your creativity to meet customers’ needs, streamline operations, and only spend money on that which truly generates value.  There’s no room left for fluff and bloat.  Difficult decisions on how you should run your business become obvious. No longer fat, dumb and happy, maybe you make that extra sales call or hold off on that unnecessary expense.  Business is very competitive, and the difference between the Hall of Fame and the graveyard can be remarkably thin.  Everyone says they want to run a tight ship, but the best way to harness your entrepreneurial verve is to tie your own hands to the yarak mast.  It will turn all of your business SHOULDS into business MUSTS.  I’ve spent a lot of time finding different places to apply the idea of yarak, and it never ceases to amaze me how helpful it is.  So that’s my eighty-twenty secret.  Shh… don’t tell anyone,” he whispered.

Energetic, optimistic entrepreneurs often tend to believe that sales growth will take care of everything, that they'll be able to fund their own growth by generating profits.

In the case of Obamacare, leading members of the intellectual class produced the appropriately rigged studies to promote the racket. Then members of the Obama administration and liberal Democrats in Congress took up these studies as an irrefutable demonstration of the wonders of Obamacare. Finally anchorpeople and reporters lined up to amplify the falsehoods and complete the sale to the American people. Despite all this, the American people remained unconvinced. Even so, the con men generated enough support that Democratic legislators, on a straight-party vote, got Obamacare through.

The smart business person sees an opportunity to generate referrals by collaborating with their competitors.

Everyone seemed to have more to do than was possible in a forty-hour week. This was by design. “Microsoft’s theory is if it takes two people to do a job, hire one,” Shannon explained. “It’s a stated policy. I’ve seen it in memos. It’s called the N-minus-one policy.” In the abstract, the approach made good sense. For all the complaints about workers lacking initiative, most bosses disliked employees who did too much or broke with tradition or set their own priorities. At Microsoft most managers, finding themselves shorthanded, had no choice but to let their people run away from them. Smaller numbers of people, especially on a huge project such as NT, made communications between teammates easier. And it helped the bottom line. Microsoft earned twenty-five cents on every dollar of sales mainly because it offered hot products in a growing market, but the company also knew how to pinch pennies.

Retailers have to generate increased sales in each location to justify the investment, and every manufacturer has to demonstrate how their brands help to achieve this versus competitive brands, either through increasing store traffic or increasing basket size, or both.

In the United States, on average, nearly 80% of new product introductions fail to generate more than $7.5 million in first-year sales, with less than 3% of products achieving ‘mega hit’ status of over $50 million in first-year sales.7 Against that background, gate-crashing someone else’s party can sound quite attractive.

I’ve seen so many otherwise very talented executives fail to see how a large amount of deals and revenue coming in now were attributable to last month’s campaigns, who are trying to whip their people into getting more sales this week – despite a lack of a sales pipeline, qualified leads, appropriately generating referrals immediately after successful delivery, and all those sorts of best practices.

Your intentions matter, and they are felt by your clients, your prospects, and all of the people whom you interact. When you come from a place of caring, you generate trust and build powerful relationships. But if your actions are self-serving, they destroy trust and ruin relationships.

Sales development is more than getting prospects on the phone, asking a series of rapid-fire questions, and documenting their responses. The job is about arousing curiosity and generating interest. Often, that requires getting at the answer behind the answer. Ask your candidates how they prepared for the interview. One might have done some reading on top blogs. Another might have viewed a recorded webinar on your prospects and your industry, while another might have downloaded every piece of content on your website.

The 80:20 Rule is always at work and Leads, Listings, and Leverage are the 20 percent of your focus that ultimately gives you 80 percent of your results. • Lead generation is never a passive activity! • Listings are the high-leverage, maximum-earning opportunity in real estate. • Leverage is the Who, How and What of a powerful real estate sales team.

That was the reason I was struggling. I had no consistency! I realized I needed to show up every single day and prospect. There are many forms of prospecting to generate

That’s why one of the fundamental concepts I originally introduced as part of Question Based Selling was, “Always positive is not always most productive.” To illustrate, sellers have long been conditioned to ask questions with a positive, even hopeful, tone. Therefore, typical sales questions tend to sound optimistic, like: Mr. Prospect, would next Tuesday work for a conference call? Or: Does your boss like our proposal? Sometimes sellers ask: Are we still in good shape to close this deal by the end of the month? The salesperson in these examples is obviously hoping next Tuesday will work for a conference call, or hoping the boss likes the proposal, and that the deal is still in “good shape” to close by month-end. These positively dispositioned questions do not generate more positive results. In reality, just the opposite occurs. I will talk at length later in the book about the fact that positively dispositioned questions tend to cause customers to withhold, or give less accurate information, which is counterproductive to your selling efforts.

For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation's multibillion-dollar line of so-called princess products, the five sisters of Keeping Up with the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun, and luxury brands - the latter a national fixation spawned in the "luxury revolution" of the last thirtysomething years, in which most of the wealth of the country had traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up with the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.

Technology partners What kind of customers are you trying to attract? If you give API access, then you attract software developers. Can you provide the support that they need, and is it worth your time? Most companies that built for us were very small, and we failed to generate significant revenue from API access. Almost all companies use a commercial website, and custom websites are rare. Here are the pros and cons of technology partners: Pros: You place 3rd party developers on the hook for support and maintenance. You free up developer time. You can expand your customer base. You lack developers to connect to a 3rd party system. When I built a QuickBooks integration for Kentico CMS, I asked them why they never built one themselves. Their response was that QuickBooks was not their business model. Connecting to QuickBooks is challenging and it requires a heavy lift for software developers. Cons: Building an integration could take several hours. Instead of building API access, can they integrate with you in another way? We pull orders from a variety of 3rd party shipping tools. Can the customer pull their sales into the shipping tool? Some developers fail to properly maintain and support their plugin. Your customers will call you and ask your company for help. If the 3rd party fails to respond, then you are in trouble. I advise gating your developer API to legitimate software companies only. Your company must provide developer support, which is also expensive and time-consuming. We had several instances where companies required multiple calls. It is difficult for some 3rd parties to follow developer guides and estimate costs. The 3rd party may have few clients and the cost to onboard the developer exceeds the sales.

Why did Connex for QuickBooks Online succeed? Here are the reasons: I received free app store listings on Intuit’s website. My app was even on the first page of their store briefly. This drove large amounts of traffic to my site. I received free listings on many other sites before they started asking for a commission. I later pulled those listings, since the cost to advertise exceeded the revenue they brought to the company. These stores failed to show how many installs and conversions they generated. I had many positive and real reviews on my app store listings. I noticed competitors had hundreds of five-star reviews that mostly looked fake. QuickBooks Online had few integrations at the time. I was one of the first companies to get listed. For QuickBooks Canada and QuickBooks U.K., my app was one of the first system integrators. I had almost no competitors who serviced QuickBooks outside of the U.S. Shopify, BigCommerce, ShipStation and other companies had no native integration. Mine was one of the first. I recorded videos and added landing pages that ranked high on Google with minimal effort. Since I had a shoestring marketing budget, this was very important. The issue I had with other products was that they didn’t offer free promotion. Since my company was one of the first, we had ample time to add features and fix problems. We have a solution that is light years ahead of competitors. Why would someone want to compete with us? In the words of one of my partner companies, “We could build one, but yours would be a lot better.” My app required no desktop apps or website plugins to install. Since my audience was small business owners, the easier the install the better. Most business users have a limited understanding of websites. Asking them to change a bunch of settings or configure something on their own is daunting. We set up Connex for qualified users. Many competitors just let users go through a self-guided trial. We received feedback from many customers that they would purchase if they could make Connex work. I added a talk-to-sales component, and our conversion ratio increased. Connex was successful because I added a personal touch in a world where SaaS owners expect users to just “figure it out” on their own. Software that requires no support and maintenance is a pipe dream.

And while seeking out the opinions and perspectives of people like ourselves may lead to a more personal and familiar buying experience, what’s even more amazing is the impact those trusted sources have on conversion rates. B2B sales cycle data from Salesforce demonstrates that, when it comes to lead conversion, the interest that originates from customer and employee referrals converts to deals at rates fifty times higher than email campaigns!9 Furthermore, data from marketing automation giant Marketo indicates that leads originating from referrals convert to opportunities at rates of four times the average, and similar to the next three highest-converting lead sources combined (those being partner, inbound, and marketing-generated).10 My personal experience over the years greatly corroborates these statistics. For example, when I started my own sales practice, Cerebral Selling, I needed to have a logo designed. Around the same time, my friend had recently had a nice logo designed for his business. I asked him who he used, he told me, and I just did the same. No further research or investigation required. A short time later, I wanted to head out of town with my wife for an overnight trip to the beautiful Niagara wine region of Ontario to celebrate our anniversary. I didn’t know where to stay or which restaurant to go to, so instead of sifting through pages of online content and reviews, I asked a friend who runs a vineyard in the region. When he gave me his recommendations, I simply booked the places he told me. No questions asked. Were there better places to stay and eat? Potentially. Were there other creative design shops that could have generated equally if not more spectacular logos? More than likely. Do I care? Absolutely not! I love my logo and had a great anniversary outing, and feel secure in my decisions around both because of the feeling I received by selecting recommendations from people I trust. Both experiences are perfect examples of the prescriptive-led sales cycle we spoke about in chapter 2. This means that when it comes to your selling motion, one of the most unobtrusive, empathetic, and authentic ways to convert prospective buyers is simply to surround them with like-minded customers who love you.

In my experience, most sales shortfalls reflect either an inadequate product or a disconnect between the product and the target market. In other words, what you're offering doesn't resonate with the people you expected to like it. A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.

Marketing for “Lead Generation” and “Lead Development” Market development rep (MDR) doing research and responding to inbound leads Sales development rep (SDR) generating leads via outbound prospecting techniques Account executive (AE) getting initial customer commitment Onboarder (ONB) to guide the customer to first value sits with a sales engineer Customer success manager (CSM) orchestrating the customer’s ongoing experience Account manager (AM) helping the customer grow the business When executed well, job specialization can increase sales velocity and improve effectiveness. Organizations need to ensure that specialization is paired with a well-defined, cross-functional process and job training for each role. Without a well-defined process, customers and win rates will suffer from poor handoffs between functions. We have seen it again and again: Without a well-defined onboarding and coaching program, the reps will fail.

Between 1730 and 1760, Connecticut’s population more than tripled, from 38,000 in 1730 to 70,000 in 1749, increasing to over 130,000 by 1760. On the eve of the American Revolution in 1774, it was close to 200,000. Town populations began to outstrip the local agricultural capacity. The abundant 150 acres of land granted to the average first comer, was soon whittled down by inheritance divisions to just enough land to get by, and then not even that. In the 1730s, the voracious demand for more land was satisfied by the sale of three hundred thousand acres in the northwest Connecticut hills, but by 1750 the last of the colony’s public lands were gone. Meanwhile, in the Land of Steady Habits, no habit was steadier than regularly producing children, so the need for additional farm land for rising generations became a Connecticut constant.

I would like to make a comparison. As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out into the void, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. And so it is in spiritual life: “God gives in the measure that we expect of Him,” says Saint John of the Cross. And Saint Francis de Sales says: “The measure of Divine Providence acting on us is the degree of confidence that we have in it.” This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken the leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God. The founders of religious orders proceed with the audacity of this spirit of faith. They buy houses without having a penny, they receive the poor although they have nothing with which to feed them. Then, God performs miracles for them. The checks arrive and the granaries are filled. But, too often, generations later, everything is planned, calculated. One doesn’t incur an expense without being sure in advance to have enough to cover it. How can Providence manifest itself? And the same is true in the spiritual life.