Tales From The Road

Slow Down…or Stop?

You’d like my Uncle Lou. He’s 87 years old, intelligent, funny, and one of the best storytellers I know. In another era, he’d probably have been a professional speaker.

He’s also the last surviving member of his generation in my family, since we lost both my mother and my aunt (Lou’s wife) in the last eight months. So naturally, I try to visit him whenever I can, an event that always brings a huge smile to his face.

As always, he shares stories of the old days when he and my father (his fraternal twin) used to get into all sorts of mischief growing up in the Bronx in the 1920s and 30s. Of course, I’ve heard most of these stories at one time or another, but it’s still enormous fun to hear them again, and, specifically, to hear him tell... Read more »

Business Self-Defense Tactics

So Who Needs Customers Anyway?

There’s a conversation that takes place far too often with attendees in my live programs. It goes something like this:

Me: What is the purpose of a customer?
Them: To get the sale.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that it’s quite the opposite: the purpose of the sale is to get the customer!

Most people follow a very rudimentary business plan: find a prospect, call the prospect, get the sale, move on to the next one. This sounds curiously like the instructions on the back of the shampoo bottle: wet hair, lather, rinse, repeat.

And it completely ignores one of the most important marketing principles we teach: lifetime value. In fact, when we do the lifetime-value exercise in our live programs, people are frequently shocked by the actual... Read more »

Everything Is Dynamic

There’s an old saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same. And while I understand the sentiment behind the saying, I have to take exception with it, because in reality, nothing ever stays the same.

Time marches on, and with it, we continue to see advances in technology, medicine, and social attitudes, although there’s a debate whether changes in social attitudes are truly “advances.”

We’ve gone from writing letters to each other in my parent’s generation to sending e-mails in my generation, and now our kids simply text everything to each other. I recently saw four middle-school-aged girls walking alongside each other at the mall, cell phones in hand, and it seemed as if they were actually texting each other!

Some... Read more »