Are your lead generation efforts meeting expectations? That’s what Ascend2 wanted to know when it interviewed 375 marketing, sales, and business professionals for its Lead Generation Strategy Survey late last year. Only 13 percent of respondents felt their lead generation efforts were “very successful.” While they may be ready for a Cinco de Mayo celebration, […]

My Three Sales Mantras 1. Believing Is Seeing In sales, we start with believing. We must believe in ourselves first in order to see the successes. I call it the “mirror test.” If you’re the little kitten looking into the mirror, you have to see a lion. If you wake up in the morning, and […]

If you thought speaking was fun, wait til people hand you a check to do it 😉 Sure public speaking is people’s #1 fear. It beats out scary things like death and spiders. And yet, that doesn’t stop many from wanting to grab the mic and share their thoughts. As a speaker, I can tell […]

Creating Success for Herself, One Cup at a Time Charisma DeZonie Driven. Passionate. Caffeinated. Charisma DeZonie is on a mission to caffeinate the world, and with her home-based business, Organo Gold, she just might do it. DeZonie’s journey to entrepreneurship started with a pink slip. Let go from a steady, stable non-profit job where she […]

As a sales keynote speaker, I often ask audiences, “What keeps you up at night when it comes to sales?” So often, sales people are losing sales because they never get to the heart of the challenge that the prospect is facing. Most sales interactions involve only a very surface-level conversation about how and where […]

I’ll never forget my first day of Sharon Middle School. It was the scariest day of school I had ever experienced up until that point. I walked into my new homeroom and there were all new faces. I felt like a total outsider and I swore that I would never be an outsider again. Then […]

I can no longer count the number of times I’ve heard someone say that, “Social media is a waste of time in business.” This is just not true. People who don’t want to adapt certainly have that right, but my philosophy is that I want to have the best prospecting tools in my arsenal. LinkedIn […]

The ‘old school’ of sales and marketing leads us to believe that negotiating and closing a deal is a competitive activity where the style of approach is more confrontational rather than consensual and there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The measure of success is whether you kick ass and get what you want. “It’s a zero […]

There’s no glory in learning how to “take criticism.” Despite what you have probably been told about needing a grow a “thick skin”, there is something magically inspired about taking life deeply personally. About getting offended, hurt, angry, and even. You don’t have to find the positive in everything others say to you. Sometimes there […]

When you are qualifying a prospect or finding the problems as I call it, you want to probe deep inside to find the logical and emotional reasons why they want what you are offering. I have also seen this form of questioning put in a different way, when you’re selling to businesses; you want to […]