Spin Selling Quotes

Everything teaches, everyone preaches, all have a gospel to sell! Better the one who is honest and open in declaring an agenda than the one who fools you into believing they are only spinning a pretty fancy for beauty's sake.

Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

That Staryk wanted to take her for nothing. He made her give him gold just to live, as if she belonged to him because he was strong enough to kill her. My father was strong enough to kill me but that did not mean I belonged to him. He sold me for six kopeks, for three pigs, for a jug of krupnik. He tried to sell me again and again like I was still his no matter how many times he sold me. And that was how that Staryk thought. He wanted to keep her and make more gold out of her forever, and it did not matter what she wanted, because he was strong.

questioning sequence that comes in very useful

If you can write it then you can sell it & if you can sell it you can spin it!

In our research we consistently found that the people who were most effective during the Investigating stage were the ones most likely to be top sales performers.

If you’re getting a lot of objections early in the call, it probably means that instead of asking questions, you’ve been prematurely offering solutions and capabilities.

Success in the larger sale depends, more than anything else, on how the Investigating stage of the call is handled.

In the classic sales book SPIN Selling, Neil Rackham describes the four phases of successful selling: (1) understanding the situation, (2) defining the problem, (3) clarifying the short-term and long-term implications of that problem, and (4) quantifying the need-payoff, or the financial and emotional benefits the customer would experience after the resolution of their problem.

Farmers scrape a living out of that cold earth, planting on sheltered slopes facing south, combing the yama for fleece, carding and spinning and weaving the prime wool, selling pelts to the carpet-factories.

Readers, protect yourselves. Authors are selling you something - even I am. Use your heads, not your heart. If we weren't good at convincing people of emotions, spinning believable yarns, we wouldn't be writers.

...we should be honest about who we are and what we do. We should tell the truth about things, even when it doesn't sound good or feel good or sell well. It's not enhanced interrogation, it's torture. It's not an extrajudicial killing, it's murder. We should call things by their real names. I'm just saying, look for the truth. Look past the slogans and the spin and what people say their motivations are. Look at what they are actually trying to do, at the world they really want to create, and once you know the truth about them, if you still want to stand with them... go ahead.

Mr. Douglas told us true. He knows why the sky is blue. Why the earth spins round and round, And where the next clue can be found. Ask him, maybe, will he tell you? His radio, those ads will sell you. Peppy song will make you wonder, If the world is going under. Bring him something from the doctor- -Nothing spicy-while he proctors. It may be those fizzy bubbles, Let him help you with your troubles.

If you’re a fly, you keep flying and being a nuisance. If you lived in Linares at that time, you could never stop going out to the fields or ranches to tend to your crops or animals. You might close the store for a few days because of the initial shock, but you would open it again because, even if your relatives were sick or dead, your needs and the needs of others—those who sold to you and those who bought from you—persisted. If you lived at that time, you could not avoid having to go out to buy food, and not a day could pass without washing diapers or underpants, even if you sent your mother to the cemetery two hours earlier. In the midst of this crisis, you had tooth decay, infected toenails, and stomach upsets—slight or severe—that you put up with for a while before having to seek help from a doctor, if you could find one. Others went out to sell goat milk, or whistles, yo-yos, and spinning tops in the square, in the hope that there were still children alive to buy them.

I imagine a hierarchy of happiness; first purchased in the 1970s, a couple would sit here, dining on meals cooked from brand-new recipe books, eating and drinking from wedding china like proper grown-ups. They’d move to the suburbs after a couple of years; the table, too small to accommodate their growing family, passes on to a cousin newly graduated and furnishing his first flat on a budget. After a few years, he moves in with his partner and rents the place out. For a decade, tenants eat here, a whole procession of them, young people mainly, sad and happy, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, lovers. They’d serve fast food here to fill a gap, or five stylish courses to seduce, carbohydrates before a run and chocolate pudding for broken hearts. Eventually, the cousin sells up and the house clearance people take the table away. It languishes in a warehouse, spiders spinning silk inside its unfashionable rounded corners, bluebottles laying eggs in the rough splinters. It’s given to another charity. They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.

None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

Gardening Work There was a man breaking up the ground, getting ready to plant, when another man came by, "Why are you ruining this land?" "Don't interfere. Nothing can grow here until the earth is turned over and crumbled. There can be no roses and no orchard without first this devastation. You must lance an ulcer to heal. You must tear down parts of an old building to restore it." So it is with the sensual life that has no spirit. A person must face the dragon of his or her appetites with another dragon, the life energy of the soul. When that's not strong, everyone seems to be full of fear and wanting, as one thinks the room is spinning when one's whirling around. If your love has contracted into anger, the atmosphere itself feels threatening, but when you're expansive and clear, no matter what the weather, you're in an open windy field with friends. Many people travel as far as Syria and Iraq and meet only hypocrites. Others go all the way to India and see only people buying and selling. Others travel to Turkestan and China to discover those countries are full of cheats and sneak thieves. You always see the qualities that live in you. A cow may walk through the amazing city of Baghdad and notice only a watermelon rind and a tuft of hay that fell off a wagon. Don't repeatedly keep doing what your lowest self wants. That's like deciding to be a strip of meat nailed to dry on a board in the sun.

From an interview with Susie Bright: SB: You were recently reviewed by the New York Times. How do you think the mainstream media regards sex museums, schools and cultural centers these days? What's their spin versus your own observations? [Note: Here's the article Susie mentions: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/nat... ] CQ: Lots of people have seen the little NY Times article, which was about an event we did, the Belle Bizarre Bazaar -- a holiday shopping fair where most of the vendors were sex workers selling sexy stuff. Proceeds went to our Exotic Dancers' Education Project, providing dancers with skills that will help them maximize their potential and choices. This event got into the Times despite the worries of its author, a journalist who'd been posted over by her editor. She thought the Times was way too conservative for the likes of us, which may be true, except they now have so many column inches to fill with distracting stuff that isn't about Judith Miller! The one thing the Times article does not do is present the spectrum of the Center for Sex & Culture's work, especially the academic and serious side of what we do. This, I think, points to the real answer to your question: mainstream media culture remains quite nervous and touchy about sex-related issues, especially those that take sex really seriously. A frivolous take (or a good, juicy, shocking angle) on a sex story works for the mainstream press: a sex-positive and serious take, not so much. When the San Francisco Chronicle did its article about us a year ago, the writer focused just on our porn collection. Now, we very much value that, but we also collect academic journals and sex education materials, and not a word about those! I think this is one really essential linchpin of sex-negative or erotophobic culture, that sex is only allowed to be either light or heavy, and when it's heavy, it's about really heavy issues like abuse. Recently I gave some quotes about something-or-other for a Cosmo story and the editors didn't want to use the term "sexologist" to describe me, saying that it wasn't a real word! You know, stuff like that from the Times would not be all that surprising, but Cosmo is now policing the language? Please!

Just down the street from his apartment, Allen discovered the perfect independent bookstore. It was the first in the country to sell nothing but paperbacks. Until that time, cheap paperback books were not sold in “real” bookstores, but instead were relegated to spinning racks in drugstores and bus stations. They were usually stocked without any regard for the quality of the literature, and finding a good book was hit or miss. This particular bookstore had been founded in 1953 by Peter Martin, the publisher of a little magazine christened City Lights in honor of the Charlie Chaplin film of the same name. Martin had decided to open a store to subsidize the magazine, and while he was putting the sign over the door, a thirty-four-year-old man passed by and struck up a conversation.

The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

On the third day after all hell broke loose, I come upstairs to the apartment, finished with my shift and so looking forward to a hot shower. Well, lukewarm—but I’ll pretend it’s hot. But when I pass Ellie’s room, I hear cursing—Linda Blair-Exorcist-head-spinning-around kind of cursing. I push open her door and spot my sister at her little desk, yelling at her laptop. Even Bosco barks from the bed. “What’s going on?” I ask. “I just came up but Marty’s down there on his own—he won’t last longer than ten minutes.” “I know, I know.” She waves her hand. “I’m in a flame war with a toxic bitch on Twitter. Let me just huff and puff and burn her motherfucking house down…and then I’ll go sell some coffee.” “What happened?” I ask sarcastically. “Did she insult your makeup video?” Ellie sighs, long and tortured. “That’s Instagram, Liv—I seriously think you were born in the wrong century. And anyway, she didn’t insult me—she insulted you.” Her words pour over me like the ice-bucket challenge. “Me? I have like two followers on Twitter.” Ellie finishes typing. “Boo-ya. Take that, skank-a-licious!” Then she turns slowly my way. “You haven’t been online lately, have you?” This isn’t going to end well, I know it. My stomach knows it too—it whines and grumbles. “Ah, no?” Ellie nods and stands, gesturing to her computer. “You might want to check it out. Or not—ignorance is bliss, after all. If you do decide to take a peek, you might want to have some grain alcohol nearby.” Then she pats my shoulder and heads downstairs, her blond ponytail swaying behind her. I glance at the screen and my breath comes in quick, semi-panicked bursts and my blood rushes like a runaway train in my veins. I’ve never been in a fight, not in my whole life. The closest I came was sophomore year in high school, when Kimberly Willis told everyone she was going to kick the crap out of me. So I told my gym teacher, Coach Brewster—a giant lumberjack of a man—that I got my period unexpectedly and had to go home. He spent the rest of the school year avoiding eye contact with me. But it worked—by the next day, Kimberly found out Tara Hoffman was the one talking shit about her and kicked the crap out of her instead

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone’s nonprofessional, have come to a point on the Trail where you’ve started fearing your own cynicism every bit as much as you fear your credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you’re apt to find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of reprieve and a certain Young Voter named McCain’s refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs’ cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines “the real John McCain” still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain “real” is: impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. That’s why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, be apprised that a “profile” of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there’s way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both: the final paradox—the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles’ spinning cubes and squares and boxes that layer McCain—is that whether he’s “for real” depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

Oh, ’ello, ’Arry,” said Mundungus Fletcher, with a most unconvincing stab at airiness. “Well, don’t let me keep ya.” And he began scrabbling on the ground to retrieve the contents of his suitcase with every appearance of a man eager to be gone. “Are you selling this stuff?” asked Harry, watching Mundungus grab an assortment of grubby-looking objects from the ground. “Oh, well, gotta scrape a living,” said Mundungus. “Gimme that!” Ron had stooped down and picked up something silver. “Hang on,” Ron said slowly. “This looks familiar —” “Thank you!” said Mundungus, snatching the goblet out of Ron’s hand and stuffing it back into the case. “Well, I’ll see you all — OUCH!” Harry had pinned Mundungus against the wall of the pub by the throat. Holding him fast with one hand, he pulled out his wand. “Harry!” squealed Hermione. “You took that from Sirius’s house,” said Harry, who was almost nose to nose with Mundungus and was breathing in an unpleasant smell of old tobacco and spirits. “That had the Black family crest on it.” “I — no — what — ?” spluttered Mundungus, who was slowly turning purple. “What did you do, go back the night he died and strip the place?” snarled Harry. “I — no —” “Give it to me!” “Harry, you mustn’t!” shrieked Hermione, as Mundungus started to turn blue. There was a bang, and Harry felt his hands fly off Mundungus’s throat. Gasping and spluttering, Mundungus seized his fallen case, then — CRACK — he Disapparated. Harry swore at the top of his voice, spinning on the spot to see where Mundungus had gone. “COME BACK, YOU THIEVING — !” “There’s no point, Harry.” Tonks had appeared out of nowhere, her mousy hair wet with sleet. “Mundungus will probably be in London by now. There’s no point yelling.” “He’s nicked Sirius’s stuff! Nicked it!” “Yes, but still,” said Tonks, who seemed perfectly untroubled by this piece of information. “You should get out of the cold.” She watched them go through the door of the Three Broomsticks. The moment he was inside, Harry burst out, “He was nicking Sirius’s stuff!” “I know, Harry, but please don’t shout, people are staring,” whispered Hermione.

We love the famous. The plastic pretties. Airbrushed arses. Fantastic titties. Hunks and comics to entertain us. Make no mistake, we love the famous. We love to praise the rich, it seems. We love to raise our hopes with dreams, Wanting a piece of the luxury action, 'Cos life gives little satisfaction. We'll prop up the famous, buying in To the media con that always spins, To sell mags and rags and movie

People, says Tarantoga, believe what they want to believe. Take astrology for instance. Astronomers, who after all should know more than anyone about the stars, tell us that they are giant balls of incandescent gas spinning since the world began and that their influence on our fate is considerably less than the influence of a banana peel, on which you can slip and break your leg. But there is no interest in banana peels, whereas serious periodicals include horoscopes and there are even pocket computers you can consult before you invest in the stock market to find out if the stars are favorable. Anyone who says that the skin of a fruit can have more effect on a person’s future than all the planets and stars combined won’t be listened to. An individual comes into the world because his father, say, didn’t withdraw in time, thereby becoming a father. The mother-to-be, seeing what happened, took quinine and jumped from the top of the dresser to the floor but that didn’t help. So the individual is born and he finishes school and works in a store selling suspenders, or in a post office. Then suddenly he learns that that’s not the way it was at all. The planets came into conjunction, the signs of the zodiac arranged themselves carefully into a special pattern, half the sky cooperated with the other half so that he could come into being and stand behind this counter or sit behind this desk. It lifts his spirits. The whole universe revolves around him, and even if things aren’t going well, even if the stars are lined up in such a way that the suspenders manufacturer loses his shirt and the individual consequently loses his job, it’s still more comforting than to know that the stars don’t really give a damn. Knock astrology out of his head, and the belief too that the cactus on his windowsill cares about him, and what is left? Barefoot, naked despair. So says Professor Tarantoga, but I see I am digressing.

The cover-up is the work of progressives in education and the media. The progressives are part of the Democratic team; they are, in fact, the ideologues of the party. They have been given a very specific assignment: to bury the truth and spin a lie to sell their team’s political merchandise. This they have assiduously and effectively carried out. Progressives can be counted on to respond with outrage to this book, not because what I say is false, but rather because it is true.

I'm head over heels for her. Someone who's as hardworking as she is stunning, who runs a successful business on her own, which she built from the ground up, no help from anyone. That's rare to find, you know?" The way he narrows his stare at Mindy has her pursing her lips. "Well. That's just great," she practically mutters. "I should get going. Lovely to run into you, Joelle." "Likewise." This time when I'm smiling, it's one thousand percent genuine. She spins around and jogs away, her pace noticeably faster than when she made her way over. "She can't get away from us fast enough," Max says. "I'd call that a win." My head falls back as I laugh. I start to let go of his hand, but he keeps a gentle hold. "Let's sell it for a bit longer. Just in case she turns around and looks back at us." He winks down at me, and I'm sold.

When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event, observers usually assume that one of them is lying. Of course, some people do invent or embellish stories to manipulate or deceive their audiences (or sell books). But most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. We aren’t lying; we are self-justifying. All of us, as we tell our stories, add details and omit inconvenient facts; we give the tale a small, self-enhancing spin. That spin goes over so well that the next time we add a slightly more dramatic embellishment; we justify that little white lie as making the story better and clearer. Eventually the way we remember the event may bring us a far distance from what actually happened.

Put yourself in the shoes of an eighteenth-century country doctor. You’re treating a very ill patient. You’ve tried everything, yet nothing seems to work. So, in desperation, you put together a mixture of herbs and potions. Your patient takes the mixture and recovers. Eureka! Your medicine works, you’ve found a miracle cure. What you don’t see, in your enthusiasm, is that the patient was getting better anyway.

For the rest of your life you honestly believe it was your mixture which caused the recovery.

techniques decrease the probability of selling an expensive product. As with any kind of pressure, closing techniques tend to get less effective when the size of the decision increases. Professional buyers usually view closing techniques as an unfavorable thing. Also, the closing techniques lose their effectiveness

PRIME Prime is an ever-changing condition, a segment of a journey, not a haven at the end of the road. Companies in Prime are recognizable: All aspects work well together, all operations thrive, and all members of the organization know where it is going and how to stay on track. Prime is a state of balance: Flexibility and control, function and form, imagining and producing, innovation and administration. But companies in that exultant equilibrium — so hard to achieve, so easy to lose — continually risk sliding back to childish habits or stumbling into the rigidity of old age. An organization is no less vulnerable in Prime than it is at any other stage of its lifecycle. The cash shortage of Infancy, the founder’s heavy hand in Go-Go, the infighting of Adolescence — those are challenges it has overcome. Now the complacency that comes with a surfeit of success looms as a potential and significant threat. I have a rule of thumb by which I judge an adult company: If it does not produce significant new products or spin off promising start-ups within any three-year period, it is either decaying or on the brink of decline. Ask yourself what percentage of your revenues come from products you were not selling three years ago? Be honest. There are enhancements, changes that are cosmetic in nature that make old products look new. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are well known for

That’ll never sell.” “Sure it will, Lance. I don’t want to sound immodest, but who’s better at spin than yours truly? And wait, you haven’t heard me wax philosophical on the comparisons between this case and Richard Jewell, or on the overzealousness of the D.A.’s office, or how they were so eager to pin this on Dr. David Beck, hero to the downtrodden, that they obviously planted evidence at his residence.

the ends do not justify the means. That to sell your soul to save the world is not honorable, nor wise. The earth will continue to spin, my friends, mankind will always be split between love and anger, honor and shame, life and death. The scales may tip in favor of good or evil, but they will always, always swing back.

Take the initiative to introduce yourself. One morning I was sitting on a bike in a spinning class at my gym. There was a lady whom I did not know sitting on the bike next to me. As we waited for the instructor, I decided to break the silence and start a conversation. I took the initiative to introduce myself and within a few short minutes, I knew her children’s names, how long she had lived in Madison, which exercise classes she preferred, and where they went for Christmas. When the class was over, I confirmed that I remembered her name correctly, reminded her of mine and shared that it was a true pleasure meeting her. A simple introduction turned a stranger into a fresh and delightful new acquaintance.

If you’re a sprinter or marathoner, can you prepare with weight training alone? Of course not. But, if you’re a noncompetitive athlete looking to avoid cardiovascular disease, do you need to spend hours spinning your wheels, literally or figuratively? No. The artificial separation of aerobic and anaerobic (without oxygen) metabolism might be useful for selling aerobics, a marketing term popularized by Dr. Kenneth Cooper in 1968, but it’s not a reflection of reality.

We try to live mindfully, being reverent in every aspect of our lives. We try to live like every minute is worship. Whether I’m spinning wool into yarn, or whether I’m selling cheese, the idea is to do it for God’s glory rather than my own.

I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it’s amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn’t know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs.

When you live in Jersey a beach isn’t enough. People have energy in Jersey. They need things to do. They need a beach with a boardwalk. And the boardwalk has to be filled with rides and games and crappy food. Add some miniature golf. Throw in a bunch of stores selling T-shirts with offensive pictures. Life doesn’t get much better than this. And the best part is the smell. I’ve been told there are places where the ocean smells wild and briny. In Jersey the ocean smells of coconut-scented suntan lotion and Italian sausage smothered in fried onions and peppers. It smells like deep-fried zeppoles and chili hot dogs. The scent is intoxicating and exotic as it expands in the heat rising from crowds of sun-baked bodies strolling the boardwalk. Surf surges onto the beach and the sound is mingled with the rhythmic tick, tick, tick of the spinning game wheels and the highpitched Eeeeeeee of thrill seekers being hurtled down the log flume. Rock stars, pickpockets, homies, pimps, pushers, pregnant women in bikinis, future astronauts, politicians, geeks, ghouls, and droves of families who buy American and eat Italian all come to the Jersey shore.

I’m not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to bring Kanish to Mel Odious Sound yesterday. Bringing a Billionheir to a large recording complex full of Producers is like opening a bag of chips at a seagull convention. It wouldn’t be long before every Producer within earshot swooped in to aggressively pitch his latest and greatest pet project, most of which would likely prove unprofitable. Rev is obviously going to pitch a project, and it very well may be something amazing. But as I’ve pointed out, in order for Kanish to make a profit, he would have to pick up half the Publishing—a non-starter for the Rev. He’s not a Songwriting Producer, so he likely doesn’t have a sufficient portion of the Publishing to share. And even if he did, no seasoned Producer is going to give half of their equity in a song in order to basically secure a small loan from an outside investor. There’s no upside. For starters, Kanish has no channels of Distribution beyond Streaming, which is already available to anyone and everyone who wants it, and which is currently only profitable for the Major Labels and the stockholders of the Streaming services themselves. Everyone else is getting screwed. And please don’t quote me the Douchebag Big Tech Billionaires running big Streaming Corporations. They are literally lining their pockets with the would-be earnings of Artists and Songwriters alike. What they claim as fair is anything but. Frankly, I don’t think we should be comfortable with Spotify taking a 30 percent margin off the top, and then disbursing the Tiger’s Share of the remaining 70 percent to the Major Labels who have already negotiated top dollar for access to their catalog. This has resulted in nothing but some remaining scraps trickling down to the tens of thousands of Independent Artists out there who just want to make a living. You can’t make a living off scraps, or even a trickle, for that matter. Mark my words, we are currently witnessing the greatest heist in the annals of the Music Business, and that’s saying something given its history. Can you say Napster? Stunningly, the only place that Songwriters can make sufficient Performance Royalties is radio—a medium that is coming up on its hundred-year anniversary. To make matters worse, the Major Distributors still have radio all locked up, and without airplay, there’s no hit. So even now, more than twenty years into the Internet revolution, the odds of breaking through the artistic cacophony without Major-Label Distribution are impossibly low. So much for the Internet leveling the playing field. At this point, only Congress can solve the problem. And despite the fact that Streaming has been around since the mid-aughts, Congress has done nothing to deal with the issue. Why? Because it’s far cheaper for Big Tech to line the pockets of lobbyists and fund the campaigns of politicians who gladly ignore the issue than it is to pay Artists and Songwriters a fair rate for their work, my friends. Same is it ever was. Just so I’m clear, there is a debate to be had as to how much Songwriters and Artists should be paid for Streaming. A radio Spin can reach millions. A Stream rarely reaches more than a few listeners. Clearly, a new method of calculation is required. But that doesn’t mean that we should just sit by as the Big Tech Douchebags rob an entire generation of royalties all so they can sell their Streaming Corporation for billions down the line. I mean, that is the end game, after all. At which point, profit for the new majority stockholder will be all but impossible. How will anyone get paid then?

Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, said, “This war was launched without an imminent threat to our families…. Radical ‘know it all’ ideologues here in Washington bent facts, distorted intelligence, and perpetrated lies designed to mislead the American people into believing that a third-rate thug had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy and was soon to unleash a mushroom cloud.

What is it?" "It's a Thermomix." "That crazy cooking-blender thing you were telling me about?" "The very one." I've been coveting this piece of equipment ever since my last trip to Montreal when I found out that nearly every great restaurant there is using them. It is essentially a powerful blender that also heats, so it will cook your soup and then puree it. It can spin slow enough to make risotto or hollandaise, or fast enough to turn whole unpeeled apples into the smoothest most velvety applesauce you've ever tasted. They aren't for sale in stores or online; you have to go through a special independent contractor salesperson, and they don't sell them in the U.S. Also? They are fifteen hundred dollars, an expense that even I couldn't justify for a piece of kitchen equipment. "I thought you can't get them here?" "You can't. He would have had to go through someone in Canada." "Wow. That is pretty amazing." "Yeah.

It was like having your teenager sell a spin in your Ferrari for a dollar. The more rides he sells, the more money he makes, until he wrecks your Ferrari.

At some point it’s irresponsible not to connect what a man says with what he does... “Who Goes Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson’s famous Harper’s piece from 1941, sprang to the collective mind... None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

But the galaxy was full of game players, and it turned out that human war games translated well to many cultures. And then there were the flashy kitchen gadgets, a phenomenon unique to Earth that had caught the eyes and imaginations of many species. Kelly heard that the most complicated and expensive gadgets had even started selling to aliens who didn’t eat, in any normal sense of the word. Some saw the gleaming stainless steel hardware with gears, spinning handles and pincers as a form of primitive artwork. Others might have been purchasing can openers as torture devices. The

There once was a girl of the Moth Folk, dark-winged, strong, and fearless. Her eyes were like the starlit sky; her footfall soft as shadow. And although she was lovely, love had no place in her heart, for hers was the tribe of the Moth King, who had waged a war on love, for ever and ever. But love, like all forbidden things, was fascinating to her. Every night of the clear full moon, she would go to the Moonlight Market and watch the traders sell their wares: printed books of every kind; pomegranates of the south; wines from the islands; gems from the north; flowers that bloomed only once in their lives. But she only had eyes for the sellers of charms and glamours. Here, there were spells for a broken heart, or to spin dead leaves into gold, or to rekindle a memory, or to summon the western wind. Most of all, there were love spells: tiny bottles of colored glass with stoppers worked in silver filled with potions made from the heart of a rose, or the tail fin of a mermaid. Here were glamours to melt a lover's heart: candles of every color; tokens of remembrance; silk-bound books of poetry. But among all the love-knots and bonbons and pressed flowers and handkerchiefs, the Moth girl never truly saw the nature of her enemy, for it seemed to her that Love was weak, and simpering, and faithless. She told herself she was too strong to fall for its blandishments. Until one day, at the Market, she saw a boy with a glamorie-glass in his hand, standing by a display of books, and stories, and legends, and memories.

Consequently, labour-power is a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why does he sell it? It is in order to live. But the putting of labour-power into action – i.e., the work – is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages; and the silk, the gold, and the palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the labourer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on – is this 12 hours' weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours' work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed.

The struggle for gay rights was about equal treatment before the law and making visible those whose persecution by the state had driven them into the shadows of society. Now that equality has been achieved, Pride has descended into a corporate orgy of identitarianism. The rainbow flag and all its tawdry spin-offs are a marker of virtue for companies that wish to sell products to the gullible and declare their commitment to -diversity and inclusion-.

I was standing by the car when two police officers showed up in the alley, very interested in me and the BMW in an alley where car traffic was not allowed at all, sitting there with a Belgian plate tag in the middle of the coffeeshop district, with me, the Hungarian guy, leaning to it smoking a cigarette, obviously waiting for something to happen. They began to examine my IDs and started searching the car. They were looking for drugs, apparently. I had been dealing with them for a few minutes when Adam showed up at the end of the alley. I was the only one looking that way, seeing Adam walking to turn into the alley; the two officers were too busy to notice what I had witnessed. The moment Adam looked up and noticed the officers around me, the moment he was about to turn right towards us into the alley, he made a 180-degree turn, the way a bad kid would do when playing hide and seek. Catching his steps the way Mr. Bean or Benny Hill would do—I could almost hear the music too—was both very funny and very concerning. He was too stupid to be a criminal; he was such a lame criminal that he didn't even think of walking past the alley's entrance like nothing happened instead of turning around and acting so suspiciously and obviously being in the wrong. I began to wonder how the coffeeshop business would work out with this guy if he was suddenly on cocaine all the time before we even opened the club? How would not he get me in trouble when there would be kilograms of marijuana and tons of cash flying around? How could I ever quit this job even if we could manage to run the place and get rich over the next 2-3 years? How would I ever get rid of this embarrassing, childish, dangerously silly criminal guy? By some miracle, in the car—which was used by these junkies and was usually full of smoking accessories—the cops didn't find a cigarette paper either, although they were very, very thorough. Belgian BMW wagon with a Hungarian guy, in an alley in the area full of marijuana clubs. They were sure they had me now, that they would be rewarded for such a catch. But there was nothing in the car. I was able to show them Rachel's Belgian registration and everything, explaining that she was my girlfriend who was in Belgium at that time and we were both working for a company selling smoking accessories; I gave them my business card. I apologized for parking there and even driving into that alley with the car. They fined me regardless. Before we started dealing with the marijuana behalf my name, we were collecting fines attributed to Adam on my name. Talk about being cheap. Apparently, he had started growing a lot of marijuana without my knowledge in a place he did not want me to find out about. As I was driving back to Urgell, we were both very silent. I was calm but he was anxious and I could almost hear the gears spinning in his mind. Perhaps at the same moment, we both realized that if I got arrested for any reason and ended up in jail, Adam could keep the 33% profit of the coffeeshop which I had signed up for and which belonged to me. ‘Thinking quickly. Acting quicker.’ Never quick enough. The sneaker. Adam was usually very slow, whether he was high or low.

entelechy,

benefits – as we define them – involve showing how you can meet an explicit need which the customer has expressed. Unless the customer first says, ‘I want it’, you can’t give a benefit. It’s no wonder that customers are most likely to express approval when you show you can give them something they want.

A Wife of Noble Character 10[*]Who can find a virtuous and capable wife?        She is more precious than rubies. 11 Her husband can trust her,        and she will greatly enrich his life. 12 She brings him good, not harm,        all the days of her life. 13 She finds wool and flax        and busily spins it. 14 She is like a merchant’s ship,        bringing her food from afar. 15 She gets up before dawn to prepare breakfast for her household        and plan the day’s work for her servant girls. 16 She goes to inspect a field and buys it;        with her earnings she plants a vineyard. 17 She is energetic and strong,        a hard worker. 18 She makes sure her dealings are profitable;        her lamp burns late into the night. 19 Her hands are busy spinning thread,        her fingers twisting fiber. 20 She extends a helping hand to the poor        and opens her arms to the needy. 21 She has no fear of winter for her household,        for everyone has warm[*] clothes. 22 She makes her own bedspreads.        She dresses in fine linen and purple gowns. 23 Her husband is well known at the city gates,        where he sits with the other civic leaders. 24 She makes belted linen garments        and sashes to sell to the merchants. 25 She is clothed with strength and dignity,        and she laughs without fear of the future. 26 When she speaks, her words are wise,        and she gives instructions with kindness. 27 She carefully watches everything in her household        and suffers nothing from laziness. 28 Her children stand and bless her.        Her husband praises her: 29 “There are many virtuous and capable women in the world,        but you surpass them all!” 30 Charm is deceptive, and beauty does not last;        but a woman who fears the LORD will be greatly praised. 31 Reward her for all she has done.        Let her deeds publicly declare her praise. Ecclesiastes 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12

The purpose of questions in the larger sale is to uncover Implied Needs and to develop them into Explicit Needs.

If you can’t solve a problem for your customer, then there’s no basis for a sale. But if you uncover problems you can solve, then you’re potentially providing the buyer with something useful.

The first step in breaking organizational culture inertia is simplification. This helps to eliminate the complex routines, processes, and hidden bargains among units that mask waste and inefficiency. Strip out excess layers of administration and halt nonessential operations—sell them off, close them down, spin them off, or outsource the services. Coordinating committees and a myriad of complex initiatives need to be disbanded. The simpler structure will begin to illuminate obsolete units, inefficiency, and simple bad behavior that was hidden from sight by complex overlays of administration and self-interest. After the first round of simplification, it may be necessary to fragment the operating units. This will be the case when units do not need to work in close coordination—when they are basically separable. Such fragmentation breaks political coalitions, cuts the comfort of cross-subsidies, and exposes a larger number of smaller units to leadership’s scrutiny of their operations and performance. After this round of fragmentation, and more simplification, it is necessary to perform a triage. Some units will be closed, some will be repaired, and some will form the nuclei of a new structure. The triage must be based on both performance and culture—you cannot afford to have a high-performing unit with a terrible culture infect the others. The “repair” third of the triaged units must then be put through individual transformation and renewal maneuvers. Changing a unit’s culture means changing its members’ work norms and work-related values. These norms are established, held, and enforced daily by small social groups that take their cue from the group’s high-status member—the alpha. In general, to change the group’s norms, the alpha member must be replaced by someone who expresses different norms and values. All this is speeded along if a challenging goal is set. The purpose of the challenge is not performance per se, but building new work habits and routines within the unit. Once the bulk of operating units are working well, it may then be time to install a new overlay of coordinating mechanisms, reversing some of the fragmentation that was used to break inertia.

The building of perceived value is probably the single most important selling skill in larger sales.

Implication Questions take a customer problem and explore its effects or consequences. As we’ll see, by asking Implication Questions successful people help the customer understand a problem’s seriousness or urgency.

In summary, Need-payoff Questions are important because they focus attention on solutions, not problems. And they make customers tell you the benefits.

If you can get your customers to say, “I want it,” it’s not difficult to make a Benefit by replying, “We can give it to you.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

If you’re thinking of starting a business . . . you have to remember that proof of concept is key,” Hanny says. “I’ve seen a lot of people fail because they were spinning their wheels on less critical aspects of the business. Go ahead and sell your product on Amazon, your website, or whatever your preferred channel may be, but get a proof of concept first, before a lot of money is spent unnecessarily. Is your product something the market, and your audience, really needs?

His hands are spinning stories against my skin. His strong, steady heartbeat underneath my cheek is selling promises. His smile is a fairy tale I want nothing more than to believe.