Ideas

By the time you're reading this, my Dutchman Jan Gorissen and I will be newly married. As general counsel for a couple of large corporations – one Dutch and one American, Jan worked closely with many business organizations all over the world.

Where we work, how we work, the skills we need to stay employed and the technologies we use to connect with team members and customers have changed dramatically. Social networking has replaced TV advertising, and YouTube has surpassed the Library of Congress as the largest library in the world.

I was in Vancouver recently working with Kris, the regional vice president of sales for the eastern region for a client company. Kris and I met for the better part of a day to work on integrating a qualification process into her team's everyday thinking and language. In short, the qualification process has two basic buckets: potential value (if we win), and winnability.

Vistage/TEC speaker Larry King has gone down in management lore as one of the most knowledgeable experts on the subject of characteristics of great CEOs.

Did you ever wonder why some business people are successful and others are not, and yet they both call themselves entrepreneurs?

R.W. Baird recently stated, "The U.S. M&A market again registered impressive numbers in June. The deal total increased 47.1 percent to 1,025, the second largest monthly figure in the last two years. Announced dollar volume (+93.2 percent) nearly doubled in comparison to the low year-ago value."

Question: "I hear a lot of companies talking about customer service these days, but not enough of...

The loss of trust leaves us with a feeling of emptiness at best, and with deep grief in some cases. You don't have to look far to find people and things we've lost trust in lately – superheroes, huge corporations, political parties, on and on.

While I was dining with several girlfriends, one of them asked, "Hey, do you ever wonder where your brain goes when you hit middle age?"

One sure way to get a unanimous non-show of hands from a group of salespeople is to ask this question: "Let's see a show of hands. How many of you, when you set your objectives for a customer meeting, have at the top of the list: 'I want to come across to the customer like every other salesperson that customer met with in the last week?'