Twelve minutes

If you’re a wine sales rep on the street, visiting accounts every day, dusting off your bottles, showing new products, trying to hit sales goals, running will calls, answering the phone, and putting out fires all day, this is for you. A challenge for one week. When you park your car in front of an account, Read More…

The gut instinct

“When you follow your gut, you get indigestion.” Sage advice coming from somebody as disconnected from the real world as possible: a Fortune 100 CEO in a high rise Manhattan corner office, who wrote a book about productivity years ago, aimed squarely at the people that he needed more of: workers, not thinkers. Being aware Read More…

Currency, value, and street cred

Adding income to your bottom line is usually in the form of selling. Sell more stuff, make more money. But currency and value is not just money. There are thousands of instances every day where you can improve your value. The positive interaction you have with a competitor. The attention you pay to a new Read More…

Who is ultimately responsible?

Sales in an account go down. What’s the common reaction? Point at the sales rep. It must be something they did. Not so fast. Sales can go down, way down, quickly, in an account for a huge number of reasons. The account’s general business is down. They want to work with a greater range of vendors. Read More…

Just show up

True story, heard from a restaurant buyer this week: A sales rep, let’s call him Willy, works for one of the premier top notch best reputation best portfolio best established mid sized distributors. The kind of distributor everybody seems to want to work for and with. Willy is working on getting into this new hot local Read More…

Turn off the dopamine loop

Remember the phrase “You’ve got mail?” It was one of the earliest internet dopamine loops created. America Online and their AOL mail service (remember when everybody had an AOL address?) programmed people to get a dose of excitement and anticipation every time they heard “You’ve got mail” in that manly authoritative voice. It triggered an Read More…