Dr. David Snyder offers salespeople insight into How to Mind-Read Your Customers using concepts from a widely used assessment called the DISC, which measures Drive, Influencing style, Steadfastness, and Conscientiousness. One valuable lesson offered by the book is the importance of changing your own approach/pitch to match the style of your customer. After all, if [...]

Q: How can you develop a compensation strategy that cultivates a customer-centric sales culture?

A: One strategy when cultivating a customer-centric sales culture is to stop compensating sales reps for only attending to “their” own customers. I often see a customer impatiently standing in line while a small group of staff members chats off to the [...]

Pete Blackshaw coined the term “consumer-generated media” (CGM) to describe the tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, online comments, digital photos, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other media that customers around the world are using to share their business experiences with everyone else connected to the Web. In 2008, Blackshaw wrote,  “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell [...]

My favorite boss (now lifelong friend) insisted on giving her entire team the day off on their birthday. It was a simple manager’s discretion day that barely impacted her budget, but the morale boost enjoyed by the team was almost palpable, leading to happier and more productive people.
My birthday is this week, and I’m reminded [...]

I just finished reading Jan Norman’s 2004 book, What No One Ever Tells You About Marketing Your Own Business.  Each of the 101 brief chapters offers a real-world story from a successful entrepreneur, covering a wealth of different marketing tactics overall. Although the book is more of a broad introduction than an advanced set of insider secrets, [...]

In his classic poem Desiderata, Max Ehrmann urged us to “avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexations to the spirit.” But what if you can’t avoid them? What if they happen to be your best customers? Or your top salespeople? Or your aging parents? Or your own teenagers?
One helpful technique for dealing with loud [...]

I’ll never a forget a story that a participant shared in one of my anger management workshops. Apparently she and a friend (we’ll call the friend Jodie) went to the airport together to check in for their flight, and Jodie pitched a fit when told that she would need to pay an additional $25 due [...]

As a general rule, people are remarkably perceptive. If you are irritated with your customers, they will often pick up on it. So instead of trying to hide your anger or frustration with customers, try this 2-step technique instead:

Identify the “should” judgment that you have about a customer. It might be “the customer should know [...]

Contrary to what you might have learned in a sales class, a recent New York Times article pointed out that the customer isn’t always right. If you’re honestly focused on maximizing the return on your investment, take a hard look at which customers are taking a lot of your resources without giving back much of a [...]

After Dave Carroll spent an entire year working with United Airlines to resolve a complaint, he finally decided to share his frustration through a funny song. His YouTube video has now been viewed by more than five million people.

“A joke is a very serious thing.”
Winston Churchill