I wanted a new sofa for our outdoor porch.  I shopped around until I found the perfect fit and match for the rest of the patio furnishings.  I saw the sofa online and then called the store to see if they had it there to go “see and touch.”    The salesman told me “If you…

I recently bought a new car.  It can be a considerable investment.  Most of us will do a fair amount of research on the vehicle of choice from options to pricing.  It’s a good practice to be adequately armed.  Yet in business many companies make significantly larger investments setting up new profit centers or buying…

It can if you don’t time the ask right Lately I have been writing about personal experiences because it has been so rife with poor, almost comical sales experiences.  Lessons show up every day on what “not to do” in sales encounters. I recently requested a quote for hedge trimming at my home. The landscape…

Today’s world cannot tolerate the old script selling methods of yesterday.  It is understandable if you have a mob phone bank of undereducated or untrained workers, a script may be necessary as the lowest form of consistent messaging. However, when an individual business representative is dealing directly with another individual, as opposed to the masses,…

Many organizations have growth goals, but are being held back by an inability to attract and keep workers. They are learning that a big impact of the pandemic has been a change among workers in what they want from a job.  Millennials make up the largest segment of the workforce and generally have very different…

It doesn’t matter if you think cryptocurrency is the wave of the future, something you monitor, or just a bunch of nonsense.  As recently as five years ago, cryptocurrency was little more than a curiosity to a small number of fanatical investors.  Today, it continues to grow, and as it grows, more and more companies…

As we await this year’s Super Bowl (can’t believe it’s now held in mid-February), it’s interesting to reflect on the changes that have taken place over the past couple of years on the playing field as a result of data analytics. Probably one of the most striking changes is how often data analytics are used…

The ability to raise prices due to any crisis, real or imagined, will eventually abate. Many companies are hurt by Covid while a great many are making great hay right now.  At some point, companies will return to a familiar spot – striving to justify increases. One industry that is now a major contributor to…

We know competitive advantages come in many forms.  We will share Wall Street Journal summaries** on both stores and our cautions. Dollar General is best known for locating in the hinterlands of rural America.  Middle of nowhere is where they have been successful.  They usually lease rather than own stores and pay low wages.  That…

Most companies have KPIs – Scorecards, Dashboards, etc. Most KPIs are financial or sales performance. While they are useful, they have rarely been improved to take advantage of current technology. Forests of data exist within every organization. Most companies have access to more data than they know how to use effectively.  Given the data-heavy technology…