Let’s be very clear about something.

Horrible customer service is the fastest way to drive your dreams into bankruptcy.

No amount of whining, whimpering, and halfhearted excuse-making can remedy selfish behavior.

Sure — the late 1990′s brought us the age of “more selling, less service”.  And that certainly sounds logical, right?

After all we are emerging from the worst buying environment in more than eight decades.  It would seem that you need to “get out there” more than ever.

It’s that “Stop being an order taker and start being a whale hunter…”type of sales preaching.

Admit it.  You’ve had a sales manager get “up in your business” telling you that you need more cold calls and more ways to “fill the funnel”.  Right?

And…  your manager if probably right.

Being proactive has never been more in style.

But chasing new customers is the slowest way to grow your business.

It takes massive amounts of time and more times than not doesn’t even work.  You chase.  They stay out of reach.

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

You’re busy.  And sometimes when you look around it seems like you’re missing that one edgy solution that helps you past the headache you have at the moment.

You’re not alone. (In fact, it gets better than that.) There’s a solution out there already just waiting to solve all your problems.

Someone else had the same problem you did and put together a solution to the problem once and for all.

Let’s take a look at awesome edgy technologies you might not have heard about before.

Sentimnt

Need to remember where and why, faster?

Sentimnt brings together everything that you read and helps you recall it when you need to remember later.  Your email.  Your tweets.  Your RSS Feeds.  If it’s a part of anything that gets in front of your eyeballs, Sentimnt helps you with instant recall.

Add your accounts and it automatically creates an index that you can quickly search any time you need to remember how things went down..

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

Everyone wants to be a winner.

We like watching winners.  We like having winners as friends.  When giving a choice between winning and losing, we usually always chose winning.

But winning isn’t easy.  You can chose to win, but that doesn’t really mean that you will win.  It just means that you are making the choice to pursue winning.

It’s like joining the local gym.  Just because you decide to pay the monthly fee doesn’t mean you are guaranteed to lose any weight.  It all depends on what you do after you’ve made the commitment .

You can read the top 74 books on motivation and inspiration, attend every seminar on the subject, and work your way through every handbook and workshop you can get your hands.  You’ll leave with some tactics and tricks and maybe even an amazing ideas or two.

But you’ll realize that winning (and the high performance antics that get you there) can really be distilled down into a single all-consuming lesson.

You have to control what you think about…

That’s an “all the time” thing too.  What you think about, you become.  That’s a rule that always checks out.

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

Everybody needs a good way to keep track of relationships. For some of us, a quick trip to Barnes & Nobles yields a slim leather address book that does what we need.

If you happen to know more than a few dozen people you may just throw everybody into LinkedIn and use that platform to manage who you know (and who knows them).

Over the last ten years, the idea of CRM has been pretty mainstream — with Salesforce setting the standard for how CRM can really be an enterprise platform for running everything that we do. Sadly, it’s bulky and no longer charming. A lot of times, it just feels unusable for building rapport with customers and really getting things done.

And a bunch of new CRM platforms have jumped up to fill in the gap:

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

We all need someone in our face telling us we can do better.

Sure criticism stinks!  But so does not getting to your goal…

In fact, that second part of the equation is the part that we can easily forget if we aren’t tough enough on ourselves.

And not that “don’t eat one more Twinkie” type of toughness.  The type of toughness where you put yourself at the very edges of painful discomfort.

It’s that one hand on the branch hanging off the edge of the cliff type of discomfort…

Look.  I get it.  When you think of motivation, what first pops into your mind?

No one wants a middle-aged, masochistic drill instructor spitting inspiration six inches too close to their face.

Not you.  Not me…

But putting yourself in that position can pay off big time for you.

In fact, there’s a darn good chance you’ll find yourself exceeding your expectations in a big way.

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

Ever find someone that always looks like he wins — no matter what he does?  You try and try (and try) and this guy seems to roll over and hit home runs.

No matter what he does (whenever he does it), that guy seems to end up in the winner’s circle.

Guess what?  You can do that too…

With a few small changes, you can be that guy.  You just need to start looking at the world a little differently.

Let’s Start at the Beginning.

Here’s a reality of life:

You will always fail before you succeed…

That’s why you cried before you could talk.  You stumbled and fell before you could run.  You went to grade school before high school.  And you fell off your bicycle before you learned to “pop a wheelie”.

Right?  Life was a process back then.  Your whole life was about turning defeat into success.  That’s all you knew how to do.  And you were really good at it.

It was over time that you started to think about avoiding defeat at all costs.

But Then you Noticed Something.

The more you avoided defeat, the more success seemed to be even farther away.

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

Every forget something that you really wanted to remember?

Who was that guy I bumped into yesterday?  Did I send that email already?  What was the weather like yesterday?

Frustrating right?

You move so fast that at times you just get frantic trying to retrace your steps.  Trying to rethink vital information that

And it’s always at the worst possible time….

An edgy technology called Poyozo hopes to solve that problem for you once and for all.

Poyozo (got to love that edgy name, by the way) gives you your life (and your online data) back, one activity at a time. 

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

Since when did sales come down to the fine art of improving your quarterly performance? To improving your quota by that 4% margin of victory.

Since when did we start looking back (on the worst sales year of 3 generations) to decide whether we were getting the right results.

Since when did we fool ourselves into the nonsense of arbitrary analysis.

OK. Let me lighten up a little.

As a former CEO of a fast moving technology company, I get it. I buy into the idea that you need a rolling 13 month plan of action and that you need to to measure the heck out of anything for which you can make a tick with a #2 pencil.

What you measure you can fix.

That’s partly because once you measure, you know what you need to fix.

You move past the nonsense of unabashed introspection — past the island of hopeful intentions. You get to a place where you see what really is.

It’s now fact instead of fiction.

You can stop hoping to do better and start working on being better.

And here’s where it gets fun. You get to decide what “better” even means.

You probably know what that means. Right now you have five or six things you are thinking about. And that’s key because you know your situation better than anyone else. But here are a few things you might want to look for:

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

If all this hoopla about the social graph and Facebook privacy settings hasn’t made you want to jump off a cliff, if you find it mildly interesting to connect with people, if you have a message, an audience, and the passion to share —  Stribe is your lucky day.

Stribe has been around for almost a year now — running their social-reingeneering in super-beta mode.  They have thousands of websites signed up and the team instead decided to keep the review of their product focused until they were ready to go crazy man.

That day came last week.  Stribe is now available for you.

Ohhh…. Wondering what the heck it does in the first place.

It turns your website (your blog, your company, your photos….) into a mini social network — a Facebook for everyone.  Let’s jump in.

When you head over to Stribe.com, you have two ways to engage:

1. You can join a community, OR
2. You can create a new community

Both are valuable.

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.

There is no one secret formula to doing amazing things – to achieving the impossible.  Timing, a lot of effort, and good old-fashion “luck” have a way of making what someone else has already done pretty hard to reproduce.

Which is why I have problems with a lot of the sales books I read.  They don’t tell the true story about what was the real cause of the success that happened.  Most of the time, it’s not a single, simple formula.  Like a giant game of Clue, you have to piece together a lot of different variables to make sense of what happened.  And if you do that right, usually you walk away with a couple of clues about how to do those couple of things right. A case study on what it takes to achieve the impossible.

Making big sales, running up the career ladder, being at the top of your class, winning the Tour de France 10 times — they are all possible.  You just need to know how.

Here are three clues that I have learned over the years:

Republished with author's permission from original post by Dan Waldschmidt.