I’m certain that this post will attract some pretty “spirited debate,” so let me cut right to the chase.

“Affordable” (meaning very low-priced) products are bad news for you and your customers, if that’s all you’re offering them. You need to have at least one premium product available now – and more in the works – or you’re going to burn yourself out.

The reason why some people are able to generate all the money they need to get what they want in their business (and their life) comes down their specific, empowering beliefs about money. It’s not because of some feel-good mysticism, like “The Secret” or the “Law of Attraction,” and it’s not a result of their particular talents (that you think “If only I had their skills, I could be as successful as they are. Oh, well …”).

Sure, talent plays a role in enhancing the amount of money people earn (and the ease of the earning), but it’s not the key factor. What makes the fundamental difference between the haves and the have-nots is the strength of four particular beliefs:

RT @ricklafave 14 tips to building a startup sales team - (fave: sales ppl = shock to system, not bad, just different)

David packed a ton of useful content into this presentation, but if you can only see the slides you’re missing at least half of the story. There’s a reason this guy speaks for a living! This was, by far, my favorite presentation at IMU.

My takeaway from this presentation: The folks at Marketing Experiments really know their stuff and if I ever have a business that needs (and can afford) their services, I would definitely sign up. Other than that, we seemed to spend most of our time breezing through examples without as much time digging into the details (those questions always seemed to be answered with “It depends…”)

Your lead generation efforts have really paid off and you have a full database of people just waiting to hear from you, but maybe not buy from you, not yet. What do you do next? Continue blasting them with email and phone calls? Or, maybe you’re ignoring them altogether? Brian Carrol from InTouch gave us another idea during his IMU presentation – you should nurture those leads through your pipeline.

InTouch is a professional services organization that generates sales leads and appointments with senior-level decision makers and influencers where qualified opportunities have been identified.

Sales Enablement Solutions, by Kadient, empower your sales team by delivering the right information at the right time - via your CRM software! Learn More.

You can probably name a number of ways to generate leads for your sales organization. But here's the catch - some produce high-quality "sales ready" leads and some are just dead ends. InTouch optimizes lead generation ROI by providing the essential human touch that enables your sales people to focus on selling to convert highly qualified leads into revenue.

From a summer job at Shoe Giant, a lifetime of lessons about selling.

"...But anyway, back to Austin, the Harvard professor. His point is that incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want, and even though you may think that all you have to do is tweak the incentives to boost sales, you can't. It's not going to work. Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else's expense...."

...People want services on their terms, when they are ready. By cold calling, you’re gambling they need something. If they don’t, you’re simply interrupting them. I don’t think you can survive in the future doing this...

good calculation method for pricing units of work