Business Strategies

A Strategic Plan from the Ground Up
How do you craft a strategic plan that becomes an reality of business? You build the plan from the bottom of the organization to meet the focus from the top. <more>

Controlling the Future

Six Levels of Competitive Readiness
To stay a step ahead of competition you must have a plan in place to move your product or service up a hierarchy of competitive levels. Once you have provided the customer need at one level, you have to get ready for the ambush from competition.  <more>

Managing Conflict

Resolving Conflict Between Old and New Management
How does a new manager function when the founding executive is allowed to stay on and the staff remains loyal to him? <more>

Two Angry Sales Staffs
How do you get two competing groups to work together as a team? Here is a case of salespeople on the road and a telemarketing group within the same company that just discovered they were both talking to the same customers. How did anger and recrimination turn into cooperation and partnership?<more>

Breakthrough Thinking

Been There, Done That. Don't Do it Again
Leveraging experience to solve subsequent challenges can reduce mistakes, but leveraging solutions can lead to serious mistakes. Each challenge is unique and requires an understanding not how one problem is similar but how it is different from the other. <more>

Cleaning Waste in Decision Making

Data Collection? Save Yourself the Trouble
Why spend up-front time collecting data that will only burn up hours (and fees) and inhibit the solution that you so sorely need? The time to collect data is during the assessment of the solution, not during the assessment of the problem. <more>

Management Consulting

How to Get Value from a Management Consultant
This was written to for client who wants to know what to expect from a management consultant, but management consultants be forewarned, this is how your performance will be judged. <more>

One Way to Build a Bond With a New Prospect
How do you get into the Inner Circle with a new prospect? Here is how one consultant used the strategy in “What Color is Your Parachute” to generate a stream of business with a new client.  <more>

Consultative Selling

Go Fishing With a Frying Pan
Closing is a matter of attitude. Your basic assumption must be that you and your firm have the solution the customer or client needs. If you negatively prejudge the quality of a prospect or the outcome of a sales call, you will betray these feelings to the prospect without saying a word. <more>

Compensate for Lack of Industry Experience with Preparation
How a consultant prepared for a visit with a prospect in an industry he knew little about and impressed the prospect by reading a junior high school book his wife found in the local community library.  <more>

Tell P-S-R Stories
The oldest and greatest communications tool of mankind is storytelling. Stories have perpetuated the fabric of civilizations, families, and religions. Stories inform, teach, entertain, persuade, and bind together peoples. They also sell. <more>

Use the "Magic" Words
At some point in a sales meeting with a client, a professional is expected to offer some course of action. If the professional is focused only on what he or she came to offer the client, there is a great risk of rejection. Using these four questions—we call them the "Magic" words—the professional has a greater probability of closing a sale. <more>

Share the Pain and Share the Gain
How to be the one to help clients with the right solution before they set upon the wrong approach and started looking for help among your competition. Clients are giving professionals subtle and even strong signals of pain. But professionals with tunnel vision do not catch these signals and lose the opportunity to be of real help. <more>

Sell Benefits, Not Advantages
Sellers are often too enamored with the advantages they have over their competition, but the customer is less impressed. They want to know “What are you going to do for me?” and even more important, “What will that do for my bottom line?” Here is a test to see if you are selling advantages, products or benefits. <more>

Customer Service

Achieving Customer Satisfaction
Talking about customer satisfaction and taking the necessary steps to achieve it are two different things. Though many companies talk the talk, few are able to walk the talk. Here are seven hurdles to maintaining a customer-focused culture and how you can clear them. <more>

How Nissan Almost Lost its Foothold in the US
If you want to be successful in the market, you must be a buying agent for the consumer. It is no longer viable to be a selling agent for the manufacturer. <more>

How a Department Store Lost its Customer Base
You have to care about your ­customers, or you will never ­understand them. If you don’t understand them, you won’t know how to serve them, and if you don’t know how to serve them, they won’t come back. The key is, knowing your neighbor. <more>

Business Ethics

Obedience to the Unenforceable
I truly believe that if we don’t watch our behavior, someone will eventually push to enforce our behavior by social or professional rejection of the person, or preemptively by legislation. <more>