Notable and Quotable: Assess and Take Action

Some days you're on fire. And some days, you're not. Every time you try to crank out a report, you wind up on Facebook. You haven't heard back from anyone whose input is necessary for a project. You have a million things to do but you aren't doing any of them.

Notable and Quotable

I've worked to turn around many struggling sales forces during my career.

"Could I get by with a lot less? Sure, but it doesn't hurt to have a spare unit." A.J. Swanson

What's it like to work without any feedback? To JetBlue chairman Joel Peterson, it's like "driving a car with no speedometer, learning to cook without ever tasting your food, or playing basketball without a scoreboard."

Every second of every day, a salesperson somewhere in the world is giving a customer something that the customer simply does not want. When this happens, it's always because the salesperson doesn't know the following four facts:

When I recently asked a group of MBA students to define what it meant to them to be a consultant, they quickly rattled off phrases such as “trusted advisor,” “problem-solver,” “objective 3rd party,” and “subject matter expert.” What was interesting was that none of their definitions mentioned the word “results.” In other words, from their perspective, the consultant is not someone who actually produces results – but rather generates advice that someone else (the client) presumably turns into results.

If a prospective customer actually opens your email, the last thing you want to do is irritate or bore the customer. Here are 12 very common phrases that should be avoided: