Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Archives for February 2018

How much is call reluctance costing you?

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How much is call reluctance costing you?

Professional sales people are the most important players in the marketplace. 

The justification for my position springs from a classic business maxim: Nothing happens until somebody makes a sale. 

But professional selling is as hard as it is important – especially at the B2B level. Plus, customer expectations in the Age of the Customer have increased the degree of difficulty in an unprecedented way. So, the last thing salespeople need is to be fighting their own demons – to not be able to get out of their own way.

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Four future 2018 headlines created by the new tax law

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Four future headlines about the new tax law

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is now an official part of the U.S. tax code. As you may know, since April 2017 I twice warned in this space that the legislation was going to favor Wall Street over Main Street businesses. 

My last column on this topic was a “good, bad and ugly” analysis after the TCJA became law, as it would be applied to business tax returns. Clearly, for most individuals and businesses, the new law is good news, because lower taxes means more cash to be spent. But unlike consumer purchases, when businesses deploy tax cuts, that money produces a competitive dynamic which is being disrupted by the TCJA. And for small businesses, there’s the rub.

In order to demonstrate how this disruption might continue to play out, I’m forecasting how the media will cover it. First, you’ll find a projected headline, then an associated first paragraph, and finally my thoughts on the impact on small businesses, most of which are structured as pass-through entities (Sub S corporations and Limited Liability Companies).

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President Lincoln’s leadership continues to impress

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It’s been 209 years since the birth of one of the most famous people in history. It’s very likely that people in every developed country on the planet have heard the name Abraham Lincoln, even if they don’t know why. 

As the 16th president of the United States of America, it’s generally accepted that Lincoln’s leadership genius made possible the ultimate resolution of one of the greatest conflicts in human history, the American Civil War. And as harsh, prolonged and contentious as that post-war “Reconstruction” was, it resulted in the successful reassembly of the United States, sans slavery. So when you combine all of this with the blessing that the re-United States became to the world for the past century and a half, it isn’t a leap of logic to recognize Lincoln as one of the top two or three individuals in the history of Western Civilization.

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The “Customer? What Customer? Syndrome”: Part II

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Last week you were introduced to a dangerous trend in the marketplace, which I’ve named the “Customer? What Customer? Syndrome,” or CWCS.  This condition is found in companies that are more concerned with competitors than with customers.

You learned that Level One CWCS infects employees who have received little or no training about the direct link between customers and their employer’s success and, therefore, their paychecks.  Level One is dangerous but not hopeless, because those so afflicted can be cured with better hiring and training. 

Now let’s talk about Level Two CWCS, which only afflicts managers. Level Two is more troubling and organizationally more devastating because it occurs at the top, where strategic decisions are made.  

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