May 15th, 2010
A business speaker needs to write books to get the information that people could use out to people. I am working on a new title about sales culture.
I could have picked many titles for this book. I could have chosen a challenging title like: “So you think your company’s sales culture is good?” I could have picked a brusque attention getter like “Hey, your company’s sales culture sucks!” I could have picked something a little more academic sounding such as “Stimulating a 2 percent improvement in bottom line corporate profits through the institution of sales culture enhancements”. I could have picked a title that boasted: “I quintupled the revenue of my company by creating a sales culture…and so could you!”
Any one of these might express my feelings about the value of a good sales culture and about my opinion of most companies’ current sales and customer service practice.
But why did I choose the title I did?
Tags: books, bottom line, business speaker, revenue, sales culture
Posted in Management, business speaker, marketing, personal growth, sales | Comments Off
April 17th, 2010
You may or may not be interested in self storage. But I took a lot of the sales know-how I have been assembling and put it into a book for self storage operators to use as a guide. All businesses need to sell better. You can order “Rent it up!” from Wheatmark publishing or from MiniCo Publishing. Even if you don’t work in self storage, you might find a useful perspective or two.
Tags: book, sales konw-how, self storage, sell
Posted in Management, business speaker, marketing, sales | Comments Off
April 13th, 2010
A business speaker is generally a noun or a pronoun. You get some information from the speaker or you have an enjoyable time listening to the speaker. But when someone becomes a verb, you have impact. As an example, I had the honor of training sales people to go door to door placing free trails for bottled water coolers and bottled water service. I did not invent the methods I found most effective. I did work hard to perfect the talk, the actions and the responses. The routine developed a name. It was called “Troning”. I didn’t name it, but I ran with it.
Becoming a verb helps people understand and internalize what you are trying to teach them and help them mimic and repeat your successes. So how can you become a verb?
Tags: bottled water, noun, speaker, training, verb
Posted in Management, business speaker, marketing, people, personal growth | Comments Off
March 23rd, 2010
As a business speaker, I am always amused and sometimes appalled at hearing legislators, board members and committee members speak their minds. Clearly the nation’s health care system needed big changes. Did we get the changes we needed? Do we even know what we needed? Will the issues of quality of care and preventative activities get the prominence they deserve?
If you listen to what the people say who did not support this bill, we have just thrown our nation and our collective futures to the dogs. That seems a little over-reactive to me. My impression is that the party out of power tends to spend more time posturing than anything else.
It reminds me of playing street hockey back in Brooklyn when I was a kid. There was this one guy from a few blocks over who liked to play hockey against my block. He was always starting fights and being a sore loser. One time he skated hard at me to try and check me against a parked car. You see the cars parked in the street served as our “boards”. He missed me because I moved out of his way. He slammed into the car and crashed all over himself, falling to the street. He jumped up and started yelling about how he hit me hard and I went down and I was a sore loser. I had to laugh out loud. But after a few minutes of his speech, a few kids thought he had actually checked me to the street, even though they saw what happened.
Politics, like street hockey, has some odd moments.
Tags: brooklyn, business, cars, dogs, health care bill, hockey, legislators
Posted in Management, business speaker, dogs, health care debate, marketing, people, personal growth | Comments Off
March 6th, 2010
The cab driver’s kids.
As a business speaker, I love to talk to people about their businesses. After the end of the Inside Self Storage World Expo, I jumped into a cab to take me to McCarran airport and home. I had been gone from home for what seemed like a very long time. The cab driver was playing a CD of music that sounded East African and had a nice beat and an endearing melody. So I struck up a conversation.
I said, “I am enjoying this song. What language are they singing in?” “Ethiopian”, he said proudly. So we chatted about music and we chatted about how busy Las Vegas seemed this week. He asked me if I had ever been to Africa or to Ethiopia. I said I had not, but that I had heard that Ethiopia was a beautiful land.
The cab driver’s kids live in Ethiopia in a small town outside of Addis Ababa. He hasn’t been home to see them in a year. When he can go, it takes him 19 hours to fly from Las Vegas to Washington-Dulles, where he has a four hour layover before flying to Rome to connect to the flight to Ethiopia.
Last year he was home to see his kids twice. One time a few years ago, he flew through Frankfurt on Lufthansa and saved two hours of layover time.
The can driver sends his wife $300.00 a month. That is enough to support the cab driver’s wife, the cab driver’s two kids and his brother’s family. They don’t live in style, but they manage to get by. There is little work in Ethiopia and even less cash. So a few American Dollars become significant.
The cab driver used to live in California, but the cost of living was too high. In California he had to drive a cab 16 hours a day, six days a week in order to be able to send home $300.00 a month. In Las Vegas, he can make more money, spend less money and save a little money driving 12 hours a day, six days a week.
He lives in a cheap apartment he shares with three other cab drivers who send money home to their families every month in Ethiopia, Somalia and Iraq.
He is saving money to bring his family over to the U.S. He just finished getting his US citizenship. It took him three years and about $2,000 to make it happen. There are no opportunities for his children in Ethiopia. His oldest child is a ten year old boy. At 14, the army will come and take him away. He doesn’t have a lot of time to get his children out.
He hopes his kids will get a good education in the US. He hopes they will not fall in with a bad crowd of kids when they get here. He hopes the corruption and inconsistencies in the Ethiopian system won’t prevent him from getting his family here before his boy is conscripted. In the US he can have some hopes for the future.
As we pulled up to the curb at the American Airlines door, I told him I would complain less about being gone from my kids when I travel for work. I wished him luck. And I wished his kids luck, too.
Tags: africa, american arilines, inside self storage world expo, kids, las vegas, lufthansa, McCarran
Posted in Management, Travel, business speaker, marketing, people | Comments Off
