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First, The Age of the Customer disrupted and made obsolete many older practices. More recently, a global pandemic – and our response to it – reset our businesses and the marketplace even more. But neither of these diminished, replaced, or made obsolete the requirement for business planning, especially cash flow.

A business plan is the result of thinking, researching, strategizing, and reaching conclusions about how to pursue opportunities. It may exist only in the head of the planner, but it’s better when written down.

Whether elaborate or simple, a written business plan is an assembly of facts, ideas, assumptions, and projections about the future. Here are three ways to use a written plan: [Continue Reading]

This is a story about how cause and effect merged parallel universes and one person made a difference that changed the course of human history.

As the 17th Century dawned on the New World, a manchild was born to the Patuxet tribe. His father named him Tisquantum. They were part of a confederation of tribes known as the Wampanoag (“eastern people”) inhabiting much of what became known as New England.

In time, Tisquantum would become a very important individual to the future of America, but not before his life would change in ways not to be imagined by any 17th-century Earthling. [Continue Reading]

Since 1993, control of the three major elements of your customer relationships – product, information, and buying decision – has shifted from your business to your customer. This marketplace transition is, by definition, a Biblical proportion paradigm shift from the original, 10,000-year-old Age of the Seller, to the new Age of the Customer.

This shift has created many disruptions across the marketplace, but none more than to the discipline of professional selling. More specifically, the element that has been disrupted most is business-to-business prospecting.

If your sales effort isn’t getting the job done, it’s probably not because your sales team isn’t working hard enough or has forgotten how to close – a process that has not been disrupted. It’s because the rules of prospecting have been turned upside-down. Here are four facets to this prospecting shift: [Continue Reading]

Veterans Day, as we know it, has its origins in Armistice Day.

“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory.”

That was the 1919 acknowledgment by President Wilson on the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI “in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

Congress made Armistice Day a federal holiday on November 11, 1938.

But after World War II, Alvin King, a small business owner in Emporia, Kansas, had a problem with the narrowness of those honored on Armistice Day. Al was so moved by the death of his nephew, John E. Cooper, who was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, that he and the Emporia Chamber of Commerce started a movement to redefine Armistice Day and give it a new name – Veterans Day. [Continue Reading]

You’ve no doubt seen the classic Jeff Foxworthy act, the one where he says, for example, “If you have more than one car jacked up in your front yard, you might be a redneck.”

Just as Jeff got rich delivering this comedic routine, you can benefit from his cause-and-effect logic by applying it to your small business. Except unlike Foxworthy, it won’t be funny if you resemble too many of these one-liners. In fact, your business might not make it. Or as comedians say, you’ll bomb. [Continue Reading]

Fear and greed, it has been said, are the two primal emotions that have propelled human civilization. Of course, both have their dark side, too.

Greed is positive and productive when channeled toward personal and professional improvement. But it turns ugly in pursuit of a single-minded or selfish outcome. When fear delivers important information it’s not only useful, it’s essential. But it can also morph into paranoia, or cause inaction.

As I’ve discussed recently in this space, at this very moment, the nature of fear and greed is changing. For 10,000 years, the only form humans have known has been analog. This means any leveraging of them was likely mechanical, moving no faster than the speed of sound.

But today, we’re fully across the digital Rubicon and there’s no turning back. In this new universe, fear and greed are being leveraged with a force that moves at the speed of light. And the new rules of this paradigm shift – transitioning from analog rpm to digital GHz – are putting pressure on our ability to keep up, armed only with ancient analog ethics.

But fear and greed are not our only productive motivators. In fact, six others not only contributed to human development alongside fear and greed all those years but have also had a more consistently positive impact on the marketplace. [Continue Reading]