The Richwood Report

Here is a gift idea that has a lot to recommend it. The item comes in a number of sizes for all recipients and can be used by practically everybody. The original link was found on the Carnival of Personal Finance, a weekly collection of good information on managing your money. Here it is, with personal notes of how it worked for the writer.

I never thought of Thanksgiving as a particularly business-based holiday, but read this and make up your own mind. Our prosperity and success as a business depends on the efforts of each to provide their own needs.

People are beginning to respect bloggers because of stories like this. Mr. Volokh is a professor of law at UCLA and has a pretty popular blog. If you have time, the comments after the post show how important customer service is to people. There are a lot of them but you will learn a lot if you read a few. The world is growing smaller and the internet is a back fence where the neighbors talk about their experiences with businesses.

It's easy to forget while we are trying to be successful business people that really successful people are successful first as people and then at business. As one old salesman once said, "First you make friends, then you make money." Here's an old classic from Ann Landers taken from the yuni.com web site. It gives some simple but tremendously important ways to be successful as a human being. Caution--They are much easier to read and say than they are to achieve. If you have time, there are other worthwhile areas on the site as well.

The Scale Press carried a helpful article on the current picture for selling. A survey mentioned in the article found that of

1300 sales professionals, only 49% of the reps met or exceeded their quotas for the year (2003) and for firms with less than 50 employees, it was 46.6%.

Different sales methods are recommended for selling in such an atmosphere. The article is available on the author's website. Another quote that seemed made for Richwood folks:

Communicate competence. Salespeople like to talk about how their products or services are innovative, cutting edge and far ahead of the competition. While that may resonate with some customers, it’s far more important for the customer to see the salesperson as innovative.

The marketing consultant was asked to prepare a new brochure. “Why do you want a brochure and how do you plan to use it?” he asked.

By drilling down further, he found that the sales force was actually looking for support with prospecting and the one tool that came to mind was a brochure. Needless to say, the brochure was scratched and a prospecting program was developed and implemented.

The key to making sales is displaying competence in coming up with the right solutions.