Sales Achievement Quotes

My people are taught from a young age to try to remember their dreams, to learn from them, and to aspire to achieve their dreams in the physical world.

In my country, we value achievement. People are free to decide what that means to them, and I’ve always considered helping others to be my way of accomplishing something important. I was hoping to serve others with my new job, but that’s history now, so I’m going to have to accomplish something big, or I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.

Listen to people from your heart, as if your life depended on it, and you will find that in turn people will listen to you with all of theirs.

The choices you make from this day forward will lead you, step by step, to the future you deserve.

Whilst people have answered questions, I have only heard my own voice thinking of the next question.

Spend your time designing the greatest reputation a man could possess.

I was so sure that I knew what they needed and what I wanted to sell them that I never stopped long enough to find out what it was they wanted to buy.

The first principle of success is desire - knowing what you want. Desire is the planting of your seed.

I haven’t had a birthday party in a while, probably because I’m not really into celebrating myself. Especially not for an achievement (the creation of me) that I did not contribute too.

Most men have professions, yet few act like professionals.

But I'd missed the truism that every sale in the world won't save you as much money as simply not buying anything.

Speaking from the heart is simple. Listening wholeheartedly, however, is much, much more difficult and most rare.

What you deserve will be down to you, and you alone.

Developing a sense of deep respect for your buyers helps in achieving repeated and predictable sales.

Destiny and fate are of one’s own making, and riches and happiness are rarely found at the end of an easily-traversed path.

Everything would have been for nothing just because I simply didn’t listen.

I should become happier at what I do and leave others happier than before they’d met me.

Finding happiness by delivering it.

In this world of half-jobs and liars, I will prevail.

Trying to copy extroverts is a recipe for failure. To achieve success, introverts must embrace their own unique and powerful abilities.

Everyone is shy --- it is the inborn modesty that makes us able to live in harmony with other creatures and our fellows. Achievement comes not by denying shyness but, occasionally, by setting it aside and letting pride and perspiration come first.

If you woke before dawn one morning with the formula for a vaccine, which would cure the most ghastly disease currently known to man, releasing millions from an agonising death, would you roll over and resume sleeping until daylight?

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the belief that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes , which are indelible--this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, to believe that they are white. These people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish--and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, was not achieved through wine tasting and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

I have discovered fallen trees across my path and have possessed neither the strength to move them nor the patience or tenacity to find an alternative way round. I have simply returned to where I came from, and told myself there had been no other choice.

As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

If you do not have a defined process that moves your people forward so the can achieve greater results, then what is it you are managing?

You’ve got to be driven to become successful.

The product of scientific achievements should be for sale. The scientist should not.

A clear mind achieves success.

Mastering the art of selling involves mastering the craft of providing your clients the education, products, services, and personal contact before, during and after the sale that they want, need and, more important, deserve. That’s how you succeed. That’s how you’ll not only survive and grow in this business, but will thrive, prosper, and achieve greatness through it.

Whereas penetration most often means that industry demand will level off, for durable goods, achieving penetration can lead to an abrupt drop in industry demand. After most potential customers have purchased the product, its durability implies that few will buy replacements for a number of years. If industry penetration has been rapid, this situation may translate into several very lean years for industry demand. For example, industry sales of snowmobiles, which underwent very rapid penetration, fell from 425,000 units per year in the peak year (1970-1971) to 125,000 to 200,000 units per year in 1976-1977.6 Recreational vehicles underwent a similar though not quite so dramatic decline. The relation between the growth rate after penetration and growth before penetration will be a function of how fast penetration has been reached and the average time before replacement, and this figure can be calculated.

The only time you have is the where and when of right now. There will always be good times, bad times, hard times, and complete disasters. However, there is no other option but to be where you are, when you are. That is a universal truth for everyone. The important thing is how you respond, what you decide to do, and when you decide to do it.

how does a state manage to achieve, all at once, the highest basket of gas, sales, and income taxes, yet rate nearly dead last in roads and highways, or school performance tests, and have the nation’s greatest number of billionaires, and one-sixth of America’s welfare recipients, and the largest percentage of any state population below the poverty line?

A crucial factor when achieving great success in the real estate industry, or any industry for that matter, is teamwork. Unity is a place of power.

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it.What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get. —Jim Rohn

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character. —Albert Einstein

If your team members can run a home, raise a family, and organize their lives, they are fully equipped to run a multimillion-dollar business.

Remember: when you walk into a DIY store to buy a drill, you don’t want the drill. Your end goal is to make a hole and, in order to achieve this, you have to buy the drill.

It has been my observation that Walmart’s “everyday low prices” are at least partly achieved by minimizing the number of sales clerks on the floor at any given time.

Asking the appropriate questions means understanding exactly what your customer is trying to achieve

Managers know what they want most: to be allowed to achieve success by leveraging who they are, not by compromising it.

Who I am is unimportant. But who I am is very important. I’ll suppress my ego now, every occurring now, so I can achieve my maximum later.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

Stop overestimating the challenge and underestimating yourself. —MARY CHRISTENSEN

Dreams are less influential than actions and actions are less influential than results.

Dreaming of being on Moon cannot get you there. It requires a focused & intelligent effort to achieve what you Dream.

One-time revenue spikes that aren’t repeatable won’t help you achieve consistent year-after-year growth.

Keep in mind that the achievements of every successful person, product and organisation were once no more than aspirations. This is where you are right now.

Without the openness, willingness and desire to change, you cannot develop, improve and achieve your future goals.

I never forgo that to be genuinely interested in other people is a most important quality for a sales-person to possess-for any person, for that matter.

Don’t make hope your business plan. —MARY CHRISTENSEN

Danshari.” It’s a three-character Japanese word that means, in order of the characters,1 severing a relationship with unnecessary things (dan), purging clutter that overwhelms the home (sha), and achieving a sense of peace by separating the self from things (ri). Cleaning your home of clutter, the idea goes, also cleanses your heart and mind—regardless of where the stuff ends up.

We all have the ability to be successful. But the truth about success is that it starts from within you. It starts by changing your internal thoughts about how you feel. Once you do that, the world is in your hands. You literally have the ability to have anything you want as long as your internal thoughts truly reflect what you want in your life and what you believe you can achieve.

A good server knows how to be seen, yet remain invisible. I was a great server, and I achieved invisibility by never showing up for work. My boss ended up firing me, probably over petty jealousy.

Goals: Setting and Achieving Them on Schedule, How to Stay Motivated, and Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar: “Zig is your grandfather and my grandfather. He’s Tony Robbins’s grandfather. None of us would be here if it weren’t for Zig.

But Sony couldn’t. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman, it had a great record company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer devices. It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs’s strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive. Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own P&L,” said Tim Cook. “We run one P&L for the company.

It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.

Nine tenths of everything is tax. Everything you buy has a complicated history of robbery: land, raw materials, energy, tools, buildings, transport, storage, sales, profits. Don’t forget the share you contribute toward the personal income tax of every worker who has anything to do with the process. Inflation by taxation: there are a hundred taxes on a loaf of bread. What kind of living standard would we enjoy if everything cost a tenth of what it does? What kind of world? Think of your home, your car, your TV, your shoes, your supper—all at a 90% discount! Government can’t fight poverty—poverty is its proudest achievement!

Many readers are familiar with the spirit and the letter of the definition of “prayer”, as given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary. It runs like this, and is extremely easy to comprehend: Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self–cancelling. Those of us who don’t take part in it will justify our abstention on the grounds that we do not need, or care, to undergo the futile process of continuous reinforcement. Either our convictions are enough in themselves or they are not: At any rate they do require standing in a crowd and uttering constant and uniform incantations. This is ordered by one religion to take place five times a day, and by other monotheists for almost that number, while all of them set aside at least one whole day for the exclusive praise of the Lord, and Judaism seems to consist in its original constitution of a huge list of prohibitions that must be followed before all else. The tone of the prayers replicates the silliness of the mandate, in that god is enjoined or thanked to do what he was going to do anyway. Thus the Jewish male begins each day by thanking god for not making him into a woman (or a Gentile), while the Jewish woman contents herself with thanking the almighty for creating her “as she is.” Presumably the almighty is pleased to receive this tribute to his power and the approval of those he created. It’s just that, if he is truly almighty, the achievement would seem rather a slight one. Much the same applies to the idea that prayer, instead of making Christianity look foolish, makes it appear convincing. Now, it can be asserted with some confidence, first, that its deity is all–wise and all–powerful and, second, that its congregants stand in desperate need of that deity’s infinite wisdom and power. Just to give some elementary quotations, it is stated in the book of Philippians, 4:6, “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.” Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that “he is the rock, his work is perfect,” and Isaiah 64:8 tells us, “Now O Lord, thou art our father; we art clay and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” Note, then, that Christianity insists on the absolute dependence of its flock, and then only on the offering of undiluted praise and thanks. A person using prayer time to ask for the world to be set to rights, or to beseech god to bestow a favor upon himself, would in effect be guilty of a profound blasphemy or, at the very least, a pathetic misunderstanding. It is not for the mere human to be presuming that he or she can advise the divine. And this, sad to say, opens religion to the additional charge of corruption. The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment. Eventually, and after a bitter and schismatic quarrel, practices like the notorious “sale of indulgences” were abandoned. But many a fine basilica or chantry would not be standing today if this awful violation had not turned such a spectacularly good profit. And today it is easy enough to see, at the revival meetings of Protestant fundamentalists, the counting of the checks and bills before the laying on of hands by the preacher has even been completed. Again, the spectacle is a shameless one.

You were raised to think in patterns set by others. To be as successful as you want to be, it may take getting out of those traditional patterns. Most people don't get out of their comfort zone. Most people don't attain the level of success they set out to achieve. I wonder if there's any correlation between those two statements?

Paul, all I know is that this is the third time we've talked tonight, you're saying 'fuck' to me, I'm a guy, and your penis has been mentioned numerous times. Jesus, you're acting like you're some teenager. Work through this shit with a shrink, man. I don't care if you're gay.' Here again, I achieved silence. But not for long. The breathing became heavy and then, 'What the fuck kind of game are you playing?' 'It's no game, man. You want to close a sale? I want to see your penis. It's a fair exchange if you ask me.' He hung up again, and I reached for my perfectly spicy, scratch-your-throat-like-a-cat-claw-hot Blenheim ginger ale and took a long swallow. This particular credit card company has not called me again. And, to my delight, AT&T never called me again after I asked one of their friendly Southern females if by any chance she happened to be a male-to-female transsexual, and if so, what vaginal depth her surgeon had managed to attain for her. 'Four inches is pretty common,' I told her. 'But if you dilate religiously, you can probably achieve five.' I even got the phrase 'self-lubricating' out before she hung up on me.

Conditions for statehood would be achieved when the settlers outnumbered the Indigenous population, which in the cases of both the Mexican cession area and the Louisiana Purchase territory required decimation or forced removal of Indigenous populations. In this US system, unique among colonial powers, land became the most important exchange commodity for the accumulation of capital and building of the national treasury. To understand the genocidal policy of the US government, the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the US wealth and power must be seen. Apologists for US expansionism see the 1787 ordinance not as a reflection of colonialism, but rather as a means of “reconciling the problem of liberty with the problem of empire,” in historian Howard Lamar’s words.

the best salespeople are very insecure. They passionately want success because they think it’ll make them a different person. Then they achieve success and it dawns on them they haven’t changed at all. What drives salespeople is a need for celebrity. They think that once they’re successful, everyone’s opinion of them will change, and if they can change everyone’s opinion of them, they’ll change themselves. Then they succeed, and realize they haven’t changed at all.” For both the successes and failures, there is the endless rejection, the long line of people saying in so many words “I don’t want you, I don’t want what you have, I don’t want you in my life.” If nothing else, selling is an endless confrontation with truth, the truth about yourself and about others. It is raw and uncomfortable and personally exposing

This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public—though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability—but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.

Here’s a rule of thumb: in the early stages of the sales cycle, any statements that you make about yourself, your product, or your solution should be responses to the client’s questions only. If they aren’t, you’re signaling that you are more interested in selling than in helping the client achieve his desired outcomes. So, don’t tell, tell, tell. Instead, engage in a dialogue and make sure all of your responses relate to the client’s needs.

I'd encourage [you] to think big and be delusional when setting goals. Yes, delusional. The biggest mistake that I made with my first business was I didn't think big enough. I limited my success by just focusing on a small geographic area and focusing on hitting small sales targets. Now when I set my goals, I make sure that they are ridiculous. I prefer to work extremely hard and fall short on my ridiculous goals than to achieve mediocre goals.

In 1960, I met a college basketball coach on the court and asked him for his best, niftiest pointer. He took the ball, walked under the basket, and shot an easy lay-up. "See that shot?" he said gruffly. "Ninety-nine percent of all basketball games are won with that shot. Don't miss it." And he walked away. I felt cheated that day, but 20 years later, I realized it was the best sales lesson I ever got. Concentrate on the fundamentals; ninety-nine percent of all sales are achieved that way.

[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.

The appropriate milestones measuring a startup’s progress answer these questions: How well do we understand what problems customers have? How much will they pay to solve those problems? Do our product features solve these problems? Do we understand our customers’ business? Do we understand the hierarchy of customer needs? Have we found visionary customers, ones who will buy our product early? Is our product a must-have for these customers? Do we understand the sales roadmap well enough to consistently sell the product? Do we understand what we need to be profitable? Are the sales and business plans realistic, scalable, and achievable? What do we do if our model turns out to be wrong?

I vowed to myself that day that I would be wealthy when I grew up. It was my birthday-candle wish. I stood in that tiny dining room on stained carpet, in front of the yard-sale table, and I promised myself something better. I will never live like this when I have the ability to prevent it. I was vehement in this: someday I would be rich. I’m not supposed to say that, I know. Social media is filled with hundreds of male CEOs and self-made entrepreneurs who tout the power of wealth and the justification for achieving it. But, if you’re a woman, it’s frowned upon. It’s impolite. It’s not something good girls do. Good girls don’t talk about money, and they certainly don’t claim it as a life goal, regardless of their reasons why.

suppose I thought of people as dogs,’ he went on ruefully, ‘and that if you gave them enough affection then they would be docile, but they aren’t dogs, Gwydre, they’re wolves. A king must rule a thousand ambitions, and all of them belong to deceivers. You will be flattered, and behind your back, mocked. Men will swear undying loyalty with one breath and plot your death with the next. And if you survive their plots, then one day you will be grey-bearded like me and you’ll look back on your life and realize that you achieved nothing. Nothing. The babies you admired in their mothers’ arms will have grown to be killers, the justice you enforced will be for sale, the people you protected will still be hungry and the enemy you defeated will still threaten your frontiers.

These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith of doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language -- they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be "proud" of. What they were was what they couldn't get rid of -- what they couldn't even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences.

Every deal can be closed. Every prospect can become a buyer. Every no can turn into a yes. In any market. In any economy. There is always an angle. There is always another attempt. There is no law against how much you can prospect, or how many times you can try to close a deal. There are more than enough ideas and millions of resources and billions of people out there to make any dream that you want, a reality. The only mental chain that will ever imprison you in a life of scarcity, is a belief that there is not enough, or that there is not a way to make what you want possible.   This chapter is going to awaken and stir up a monster of influence and achievement inside you. This monster works by being totally aware of all the resources that you have at your disposal, and not being afraid to any means to influence. ” Excerpt From: “Unlimited Influence: Sell Any Idea One On One - Chapter: Gun To Your Head

mark-down, which discounts the selling price to customers and, so long as demand is ‘elastic’, results in increased sales of the product line. However, this is an expensive method of selling products, as it reduces the profit achieved on the products. In fact mark-down is the single largest cost to a fashion retail business after the cost of the products themselves. It is worth remembering at this point that the main – and frequently only – source of income for a fashion retailer is the profit from the sales of its products. Less profit per garment means less income to pay its bills. Furthermore, this tactic is less effective when general trading conditions are poor, as the competition is usually doing the same thing. It is vital then that the fashion retailer knows what its customers want and are expecting. Problems in defining and then keeping up with changing customer needs and expectations are arguably the most important factor in successful selling. Large retail businesses like Marks & Spencer

I really should simplify my existence. How much trouble is a person required to have? I mean, is it an assignment I have to carry out? It can’t be, because the only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy. But to tell you the truth, Kayo, since you are the kind of guy who will understand it, my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that’s the worst of being helpless. Oh, I don’t mean like the swimmer on the sea or the child on the grass, which is the innocent being in the great hand of Creation, but you can’t lie down so innocent on objects made by man,” I said to him. “In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can’t keep so many things on your mind and be happy. ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Well, never mind about Ozymandias now being just trunkless legs; in his day the humble had to live in his shadow, and so do we live under shadow, with acts of faith in functioning of inventions, as up in the stratosphere, down in the subway, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, rising and falling in elevators where our safety is given in keeping. Things done by man which overshadow us. And this is true also of meat on the table, heat in the pipes, print on the paper, sounds in the air, so that all matters are alike, of the same weight, of the same rank, the caldron of God’s wrath on page one and Wieboldt’s sale on page two. It is all external and the same. Well, then what makes your existence necessary, as it should be? These technical achievements which try to make you exist in their way?” Kayo said, not much surprised by this, “What you are talking about is moha—a Navajo word, and also Sanskrit, meaning opposition of the finite. It is the Bronx cheer of the conditioning forces. Love is the only answer to moha, being infinite. I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy. They are always the same but sometimes one quality dominates and sometimes another.

Napoleon was unlucky that his time in power coincided with the flourishing of the first fully professional British political caricaturists – James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank – still among its greatest exponents, who all fastened on him as their victim. Gillray fought in the Duke of York’s Flanders campaign and never saw Napoleon, but virtually single-handedly created the image of him as physically small – ‘Little Boney’. Yet even the British caricaturists never reached the level of pure loathing achieved by the Russian Ivan Terebenev or the Prussian Johann Gottfried Schadow, let alone the Bavarian Johann Michael Voltz, whose caricature The Triumph of the Year 1813 depicted Napoleon’s head entirely composed of corpses.52 Of course there were also pro-Napoleon engravings on sale in London for as much as 2s 6d in 1801, a reminder that he had his British admirers.53 Yet overall, British Francophobia easily matched French Anglophobia. The market for highly abusive prints of Napoleon was much larger than for positive images of him, and the standard work on English anti-Napoleonic caricature and satire covers two full volumes, even without

The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within. The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.

President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), accountable for the overall achievement of the Strategic Objective and reporting to the SHAREHOLDERS who include, on an equal basis, Jack and Murray. • Vice-President/Marketing, accountable for finding customers and finding new ways to provide customers with the satisfactions they derive from widgets, at lower cost, and with greater ease, and reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Operations, accountable for keeping customers by delivering to them what is promised by Marketing, and for discovering new ways of assembling widgets, at lower cost, and with greater efficiency so as to provide the customer with better service, reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Finance, accountable for supporting both Marketing and Operations in the fulfillment of their accountabilities by achieving the company’s profitability standards, and by securing capital whenever it’s needed, and at the best rates, also reporting to the COO. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Marketing are two positions: Sales Manager and Advertising/Research Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Operations are three positions: Production Manager, Service Manager, and Facilities Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Finance are two positions: Accounts Receivable Manager and Accounts Payable Manager.

also been a white-collar worker in my career. In my experience, there are two types of people who do this type of work: Achievers and Hiders. Achievers are the people who want to perform at a high level. They are ambitious, motivated and energetic. They are full of ideas and want to move up the corporate ladder, which are great attributes to have. But there is a downside for the Achiever. The moment a person decides to be an Achiever, they become a target. Their boss sees them as threatening to their job, so they start to hold them down or take shots at their reputation. Their peers see them as a person who will either embarrass them or keep them from getting a promotion, so they start to do what they can to undermine their accomplishments. So, to remain an Achiever and survive in this hostile environment, a person must become good at one thing that has nothing to do with their productivity—and that’s politics. They must learn how to navigate the political world by diminishing their enemies and strengthening their relationship with powerful people. In fact, some of the most successful people in the corporate world aren’t Achievers at all. They are pure politicians. So if you decide to work in the corporate environment and to be an Achiever, you must accept the fact that you must become a good politician also. Now, let’s talk about the Hiders. These are the people who HATE politics, but still need a job. They learn not to be the ambitious Achiever. They don’t stand out. They don’t speak up in meetings. They don’t bring new ideas. They HIDE. They keep their heads down and do as they’re told. They do just enough so that they aren’t talked about negatively. They survive. And this has worked for decades. But in the New Economy, it’s becoming much more difficult to hide. And people are running out of time. So, back to our Perfect Career List: Can a white-collar job deliver on the list? Again, the clear answer is no—certainly not in very many areas. Sales

The collapse, for example, of IBM’s legendary 80-year-old hardware business in the 1990s sounds like a classic P-type story. New technology (personal computers) displaces old (mainframes) and wipes out incumbent (IBM). But it wasn’t. IBM, unlike all its mainframe competitors, mastered the new technology. Within three years of launching its first PC, in 1981, IBM achieved $5 billion in sales and the #1 position, with everyone else either far behind or out of the business entirely (Apple, Tandy, Commodore, DEC, Honeywell, Sperry, etc.). For decades, IBM dominated computers like Pan Am dominated international travel. Its $13 billion in sales in 1981 was more than its next seven competitors combined (the computer industry was referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”). IBM jumped on the new PC like Trippe jumped on the new jet engines. IBM owned the computer world, so it outsourced two of the PC components, software and microprocessors, to two tiny companies: Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft had all of 32 employees. Intel desperately needed a cash infusion to survive. IBM soon discovered, however, that individual buyers care more about exchanging files with friends than the brand of their box. And to exchange files easily, what matters is the software and the microprocessor inside that box, not the logo of the company that assembled the box. IBM missed an S-type shift—a change in what customers care about. PC clones using Intel chips and Microsoft software drained IBM’s market share. In 1993, IBM lost $8.1 billion, its largest-ever loss. That year it let go over 100,000 employees, the largest layoff in corporate history. Ten years later, IBM sold what was left of its PC business to Lenovo. Today, the combined market value of Microsoft and Intel, the two tiny vendors IBM hired, is close to $1.5 trillion, more than ten times the value of IBM. IBM correctly anticipated a P-type loonshot and won the battle. But it missed a critical S-type loonshot, a software standard, and lost the war.

the ten thousand things To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things. – Eihei Dogen If one is very fortunate indeed, one comes upon – or is found by – the teachings that match one’s disposition and the teachers or mentors whose expression strikes to the heart while teasing the knots from the mind. The Miriam Louisa character came with a tendency towards contrariness and scepticism, which is probably why she gravitated to teachers who displayed like qualities. It was always evident to me that the ‘blink’ required in order to meet life in its naked suchness was not something to be gained in time. Rather, it was clear that it was something to do with understanding what sabotages this direct engagement. So my teachers were those who deconstructed the spiritual search – and with it the seeker – inviting one to “see for oneself.” I realised early on that I wouldn’t find any help within traditional spiritual institutions since their version of awakening is usually a project in time. Anyway, I’m not a joiner by nature. I set out on my via negativa at an early age, trying on all kinds of philosophies and practices with enthusiasm and casting them aside –neti neti – equally enthusiastically. Chögyam Trungpa wised me up to “spiritual materialism” in the 70s; Alan Watts followed on, pointing out that whatever is being experienced is none other than ‘IT’ – the unarguable aliveness that one IS. By then I was perfectly primed for the questions put by Jiddu Krishnamurti – “Is there a thinker separate from thought?” “Is there an observer separate from the observed?” “Can consciousness be separated from its content?” It was while teaching at Brockwood Park that I also had the good fortune to engage with David Bohm in formal dialogues as well as private conversations. (About which I have written elsewhere.) Krishnamurti and Bohm were seminal teachers for me; I also loved the unique style of deconstruction offered by Nisargadatta Maharaj. As it happened though, it took just one tiny paragraph from Wei Wu Wei to land in my brain at exactly the right time for the irreversible ‘blink’ to occur. I mention this rather august lineage because it explains why the writing of Robert Saltzman strikes not just a chord but an entire symphonic movement for me. We are peers; we were probably reading the same books by Watts and Krishnamurti at the same time during the 70s and 80s. Reading his book, The Ten Thousand Things, is, for me, like feeling my way across a tapestry exquisitely woven from the threads of my own life. I’m not sure that I can adequately express my wonderment and appreciation… The candor, lucidity and lack of jargon in Robert’s writing are deeply refreshing. I also relish his way with words. He knows how to write. He also knows how to take astonishingly fine photographs, and these are featured throughout the book. It’s been said that this book will become a classic, which is a pretty good achievement for someone who isn’t claiming to be a teacher and has nothing to gain by its sale. (The book sells for the production price.) He is not peddling enlightenment. He is simply sharing how it feels to be free from all the spiritual fantasies that obscure our seamless engagement with this miraculous thing called life, right now.

Writing your book is not the end all of your strategy. It is a powerful catalyst that will push you to the top of your game. You see, something magical happens when you write your book and this is the best place to mention it because a sale happens when your book is complete. You sell yourself on the idea that you are more than you previously believed yourself to be. You get to experience that “I did it” moment where your mind releases these wonderful stimulators that make you feel awesome. You see yourself in a different way and this opens up a greater opportunity for accomplishment, achievement, and success.

Why celebrate my birthday? My birthday is the product of two people’s—my parents’—hard work. I can’t celebrate what I didn’t earn. However, anything I achieved after the day I was born, I’m free to celebrate.

So what? This produces a onetime cash windfall from inventory reduction and speeds return on investment, but is it really a revolutionary achievement? In fact, it is because the ability to design, schedule, and make exactly what the customer wants just when the customer wants it means you can throw away the sales forecast and simply make what customers actually tell you they need.

A successful life is one that is lived through understanding and pursuing one’s own path, not chasing after the dreams of others. —Chin-Ning Chu

It is very easy to never fall down: Just don’t ever do anything.

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.

In West's guide, rule-of-thumb guidance comes in two formats that most valuation experts recognize:  Percentage of annual sales: If a business had total sales of $ 100,000 last year and the multiple for that business was 40 percent of annual sales, the price based on that particular rule of thumb would be $ 40,000.  Multiple of earnings: An earnings multiplier makes the most sense to prospective buyers. It directly addresses the buyer's motive to make money: to achieve a return on investment. In many small companies, this multiple is commonly used against what is known as seller's discretionary earnings (SDE), which are earnings before accounting for the following items: • Income taxes • Nonrecurring income and expenses • Nonoperating income and expenses • Depreciating an amortization • Interest expense or income • Owner's total compensation for one owner/ operator after adjusting the total compensation of all owners to market value

In the words of leadership guru Marshall Goldsmith, “What got you here won’t get you there.” Market share and revenue growth earn headlines, but you can’t achieve customer and revenue scale without scaling up your organization, in terms of the size and scope of your staff, as well as your financial, product, and technology strategy. If the organization doesn’t grow in lockstep with its revenues and customer base, things can quickly spiral out of control. For example, during a period of blitzscaling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Oracle Corporation focused so single-mindedly on sales growth that its organization lagged badly on both technology (where it fell behind archrival Sybase’s) and finance and nearly went bankrupt as a result. It took the turnaround efforts of Ray Lane and Jeff Henley to stave off disaster and reposition Oracle for its later success.

A company’s revenue engine is a critical success factor. I had seen from my own direct experience how easy it was to get caught in silos: marketing people would just think of marketing, salespeople would just think of sales, and accounting wouldn’t think of itself as part of the revenue engine at all. Furthermore, product and the revenue engine were too often thought of completely independent of each other. The need for a more integrated approach was on my mind from the beginning. The revenue engine is a whole system. It encompasses a diverse set of integrated components, each doing its part to advance the system’s purpose. The engine is not just comprised of marketing and sales— it includes product, accounting, and the underlying technology and data infrastructure required to keep everything flowing. It involves people, tools, workflow, and metrics. Its purpose is to optimize reach, conversion, and expansion of customer spend. I call my revenue engine model “the bowtie schema.” It was the product of continuous iteration. As I interacted with marketing and sales practitioners and waded through the research, the model slowly emerged. The final model conveys not just the product and customer journey across the bowtie, but also the foundational layers that support that journey-- the interaction between people tools, workflow, and metrics that make it all happen. The most basic question a CEO must answer is whether the product has achieved a value breakthrough. Without that, the revenue engine is irrelevant. Once product-market fit is confirmed, the next step is to clearly identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and your business model. This includes the lifetime value (LTV) profile of your company. Assuming a strong product, a clear ICP, and a solid understanding of the constraints composed by your unit economics, the path forward is clear. Then, the focus will turn to uplifting the maturity of your revenue engine and scaling it efficiently.

Once you’ve identified your income and sales goals and the two or three things you need to do on a consistent basis to reach them, you have the raw materials to put together a simple plan to achieve them. I call this a Prosperity Plan.

A burning desire requires a deep emotional commitment to the income and sales goals you listed in the Focus step. It’s not enough to have only a passing desire to achieve these goals.

An emotional commitment means making your income and sales goals and the things you need to do to achieve them (the directions) another strand of your DNA. They must invade every cell of your body.

A QUIET-TIME RITUAL A Quiet-Time Ritual is simply taking 10 to 15 minutes per day and reviewing your Prosperity Plan. As you review your income and sales goals and the directions you have outlined to achieve them, allow yourself to imagine what it will feel like when you have reached your goals. Allow yourself to emotionally experience the achievements. As Napoleon Hill once wrote, “Imagine yourself already in possession of them.

As you review your Prosperity Plan each day, you are placing the goals you want to achieve and the things you need to do to achieve them inside your box.

Keep in mind that in sales “what gets measured gets done.” It is critical to have specific income and sales goals so you can identify exactly when you achieve them.

You awaken early, and as you have your morning coffee, you pull out your Prosperity Plan and enjoy your Quiet-Time Ritual. For ten to fifteen minutes, you review your income and sales goals and visualize yourself doing the things you know you need to do to reach them. You allow yourself to bask in the glow of financial success. You allow yourself to experience the emotion of being a true sales professional and realizing your true income potential. You revel in it. You allow yourself to feel the “burning desire” of achieving your “definite purpose.” You imagine yourself already in possession of it.

When you have a Prosperity Mindset, you have the keys to the kingdom, because nothing will hold you back, and nothing will deter you from achieving your main objectives.

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.