Question: I need to change sales tax settings for a large number of my customers. Do I need to go into each customer to make the changes? Answer: No, fortunately! QuickBooks has a wonderful feature to save you time with that chore. Go to “Lists”>”Add/Edit Multiple List Entries”>”Select Customers” from the dropdown box at the…
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Competitive research is important, but it can be hard to find time to do it. Trusting someone else to summarize for you can leave important holes in your understanding of competitors’ strategies and processes. I want to make sure I’m clear about who I am and where I fit into the marketplace, as well as…
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Most salespeople are extremely agile. Extremely agile. Salespeople want to say “yes” to anything. Agility is critical to success in sales. A great process is critical, too, but being flexible to meet each customer’s needs is equally critical. Agility often breaks down once you get past sales. Operation teams often are far less agile by…
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Though I already have provided my opinion of the best NBA giveaways, the experts at ESPN ranked the top five NBA giveaways this season. There certainly are some creative promotions, and even with the ones I thought I had seen before, I noticed cool, new features that I wouldn’t have thought of. ESPN gave the…
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Be bad at something, perhaps a few things. Consider being downright awful at one thing. Why be bad at something? Simply put: So you can be great at the things that matter. Consider Amazon. It isn’t great at “in-person” customer service, even though it is great at customer service. In fact, it offers some of the…
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In my last article, I discussed the No. 1 reason why most people in our industry aren’t rich. In that article, I stated that there is no good reason for people in our industry to make less than $500,000 per year income unless they choose not to. To some, that may sound like a lofty,…
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Question: What do you know about buying groups? Answer: There are variations of buying groups in our industry—from a couple of distributors banding together loosely to companies that offer other services and approaches. To answer this question fully, I went to Jamie Coggeshall, president of AIMastermind (AIM), a group that purely is a buying group.…
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Some day, I’m going to change! Many adults still are struggling to find out what they want to do. Oh, they’re busy. But mostly they react and react and react, and never really set their own directions. They expend a lot of energy trying to make a living and spend little time making a life.…
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Every business has metrics, but too many use vanity metrics that make them feel good about what is being done rather than providing insights to be better. For example, we’ve all suffered from the call center that is so focused on wrapping up the call rather than resolving the problem. Why? Because the more calls,…
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There’s one reason why most people in our industry aren’t rich. At the end of the day, the business we are really in is the “know, like and trust” business. That’s right. Our real job as industry professionals is to get people to know us, like us and trust us. It’s true if we are…
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