Question Obsession: The Consultant’s Nemesis
Do you go into sales meetings – even meetings with your existing clients – with a slew of prepared questions? Do you constantly find yourself asking question after question in…
A Better New Year’s Resolution
Eleven years have passed since I first wrote the following thoughts on New Years resolutions. Frankly, it was good. And frankly I haven’t been able to write a better one.…
Don’t Confuse Your KPIs with Your CSFs
I spoke with BigCo, Inc. They wanted their B2B salespeople to become trusted advisors. They felt (correctly) that greater trust levels with their customers would result in greater intra-customer market…
Relationships or Metrics? I Haven’t Got Time for Both
Why is it that, in today's age of instant gratification, we feel like we never have enough time? Emails fly across our inboxes – we get instant responses. Someone reaches…
So, You Don’t Have Time To Be a Trusted Advisor?
One of the more frequent comments I get in talking about being a trusted advisor is this: “We’d love to practice all the things you talk about, Charlie, we agree…
New Year, New Perspective: The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking
To kick off the new year, we thought we'd look back at one of our more popular eBooks: The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking. It’s the fifth in the our Trusted…
A Better New Year’s Resolution
It's that time of year again – resolutions. We all start to assess how we can improve on the last year. I wrote a pretty good blog post at this…
The VW Trust Sinkhole: It’s Worse Than You Think
A. The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal. Q. What do you get when you assign German engineering the task of developing a high-performance trust-and-ethics violation? If you don’t know the basics of…
That’s Not a CSF – That’s Just a KPI!
I had a conversation with BigCo., Inc. They want their B2B salespeople to become trusted advisors. They felt (correctly) that greater trust levels with their customers would result in greater…
Facts, Phrases, and Ferguson
“Hands up, don’t shoot,” became a chanted slogan for outraged protesters after Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri. There was considerable mainstream media skepticism from the beginning about whether Mr. Brown actually had…