Carole Mahoney wrote a review of Sales Shift by Frank Belzer last Sunday. I commented almost immediately and subscribed to see future comments. David Weinhaus couldn't help himself and shared his thoughts. I was commenting at David when I realized that it was going to be a long comment. So, use the link above to go read her review and the comments. Then come back and finish here. I'll wait.

I just saw a survey about on line civility.

Everyone has heard of the acronym AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action). It’s been around since the the turn of the 20th century when E. St. Elmo Lewis first described it. Over the years, many ‘experts’ have felt the need to modify, rename, or add to the basic steps, but seriously, do we really need a submarine version, a basebal version or an inbound marketing version? If a salesperson understands and follows the basics, they can do quite well.

So, taking a lesson from Star Wars, why start at the beginning when you can start in the middle? Let’s start with Interest. I know that the acronym means that we need to create interest within our client, but my question is, “Can you teach a salesperson how to be create interest?” Several years ago, I attended a conference in Rhode Island. One of the speakers reflected on advice that his father had given him as he set out to make his fortune. His father said,

The rest of the title is "That I'm Never Gonna Make Again!".

February was an eye-opener!

Once upon a time, I got an email from my son, Mark, suggesting that I check out this new thing called LinkedIn. I joined on 2/4/2004. Several years later, I found out that I was actually the 197,161^st person to join LinkedIn. That made me curious. So, I looked at Mark Roberge (#36,253) and Pete Caputa (#7,346) to see when they had joined. Here’s why I joined. Back then, LinkedIn was suggesting that if I was connected to Pete, and I was connected to Mark, and Pete wanted to be introduced to Mark, he’d ask me for an introduction. Now, if I know them both well enough, trust and respect them enough, I’m gonna make that introduction knowing that they’ll both be professional and bring value to knowing each other. Now, honestly, like many early adopters back then, I didn’t do much with it. I was a face to face, belly to belly salesman that didn’t have much use for this fad called the internet. LinkedIn grew without me, but eventually I started using it more. Now, I’m on LinkedIn every day along with 200 million others.

Last December, Lori Richardson (#29,426) and I had a blog-versation about whether or not to show or hide our connections on LinkedIn. (We agreed to disagree.) I just read Lori’s article, “Top Mistakes Using LinkedIn for Sales – Impersonal Requests”. This isn’t a new topic and many that I respect have written on it before. Frank Belzer (#18,132,536) shared 7 rules in 2011. Trish Bertuzzi (#230,786) has written six articles with LinkedIn in the title and the aforementioned Pete ‘I’ve got LinkedIn seniority’ Caputa has 10 different articles mentioning LinkedIn. Casey Lockwood (#26,117,371) invited me to connect last October 16^th and wound up writing this article for my blog.

I thought that I wrote on this before, but when I searched my archives, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. So, here’s what’s on my mind? What is a consultant? How did they get to be one? Are they consultative?

What is a consultant?

Elaine and I went to see Silver Linings Playbook yesterday and as sometimes happens, I left with a great lesson. If you haven't seen it, I am not going to spoil the movie for you.

Back in the day when $20K/year was 'livable', I worked with a company that was making a fuss about reps that sold $1,000 in a single day. As I think back on those times, I realize a few things.

As you know, I recently moved my blog from GoDaddy's Quick Blogcast platform to Hubspot's platform. I had looked into it before and it seemed to complicated for me. So, I didn't, but recently, a GoDaddy rep mentioned that they were eliminating the Quick Blogcast platform and suggesting that users switch to WordPress. I don't have anything against WordPress, but I do have reasons to prefer Hubspot. So, I asked Melissa at Inbound Design Studio if she would help me with the migration. This is where the story begins.