Drive up to a dealership and you will most likely see a lot lizard. Their species is easy to spot. They tend to congregate in front of the dealership, smoking, joking, complaining and waiting to wait on someone. Notice I said waiting to wait on. These lizards are a curious species in how they tend to look for prey. The professional is a different breed. The professional tends to not wait on much or for long. The professional has goals, a work plan and is too busy taking action…

Two things keep people from being successful: laziness and the lack of leverage. The good news is that neither of these are incurable diseases, but they can be if left untreated. Let’s take a look at both and how to get rid of each one.

Leverage creates the tipping point that gets you moving and taking action. Leverage can come from wants, needs, fear, love, hate and other emotional triggers. All leverage points are good if you channel them correctly, even if they…

How would you rate the skill sets of the sales staff at your dealership? Let’s review a few of those skill sets:

• Phone skills — taking inbound calls and making outbound calls

• Follow-up skills — Following up sold and unsold customers with an organized game plan utilizing multiple streams of follow-up methods

• Marketing — Utilizing a planned and sequenced marketing campaign utilizing multiple media methods for low- to no…

On November 19, 2005, a day after having surgery, I was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma cancer. I would compare receiving the news to going to the dentist and being numbed. However, this numbed my whole body. For 20 minutes I rushed through all kinds of thoughts and emotions – shock, anger, “why me?” questions, sadness.

After the 20 minutes, I made a big decision. I decided to live. I decided that all of the emotions and thoughts I was experiencing were not supporting…

For as long as I can remember, traditional sales training has focused highly on certain sales skills such as cold calling, presentation-demonstration, objection handling and closing. This model is outdated and out of touch. The traditional model that is taught to salespeople has an adversarial and combative tone that goes against the grain of basic human communication.

Selling is not something you do to someone. By my definition, selling is assisting people in finding…

You may find this article a bit odd, knowing that it was written by a sales trainer, but I believe that traditional selling is dead on arrival. The days of hiring and building a well-trained sales staff that executes all facets of the sale, follow up, prospecting, marketing, telephone skills and building a database of repeat buyers has, for the most part, been dead for a while.

Some of you reading this may be shocked or even angry at such a statement, and declare that it is…

The day after the Super Bowl it seems like everyone will be reviewing the commercials and deciding which one was best. The sports channels will review every detail from the game and the players who made the big plays. The news will focus on the weird black out at the Super Dome. However, the best lesson to be learned from the Super Bowl is in the story behind the story of Joe Flacco.

There will be a lot of emphasis put on Joe Flacco’s performance in the Super Bowl but let’s…