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John Pearson Associates
 

 

Issue No. 24 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting focuses on your sales failures and what you can learn from them. Peter Drucker said, “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”  This week’s book and the bucket require hard work—but it’s worth it. Enjoy.

   

 


Halfway through a CEO Dialogue roundtable in Dallas 10 years ago, a ministry CEO, who listened more than he talked, made this astute observation of his colleagues.  He drawled, “It seems to me, friends, that every CEO here today is selling and no one is buying!” His insight brought the selling to a complete stop—and, as I recall, several partnering initiatives emerged that day.

Most nonprofit and ministry leaders do not come from sales backgrounds.  They have plenty of passion, but their sales strategies are learned on the job with considerable pain and embarrassment.  Whether you’re selling to donors or members, or pitching products, events or life transformation, you’ll benefit immediately from Dan Seidman’s hilarious book, Sales Autopsy: 50 Postmortems Reveal What Killed the Sale (and What Might Have Saved It).

“Sometimes we just need to sell and shut up,” cautions Seidman.  He learned that after accidentally setting fire to the buffet table in a Hyatt ballroom filled with 3,000 potential customers!  In another foot-in-mouth disaster, “I learned that all those sales books and tapes that tell you to promote yourself at every possible opportunity are sometimes wrong.”  Buy the book—it’s fun and fantastic! (How’s that for a low key pitch?).

SalesAutopsy.com.

 

   

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
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1. Help me list on the flipchart today all the products, programs, events and donor opportunities we’re selling to our customers.

2. Now let’s put on the flipchart any sales training we’ve experienced to prepare us to sell. Include books, tapes, workshops, mentoring, conferences, etc.  Do we need more sales training?

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Insights from the Management Buckets Workshop Experience

Networking is hard work, but is often viewed as unnecessary and, quite frankly, is too often random and rarely focused.  Smart CEOs and managers practice intentional networking.  It’s the good, better, best principle.

Attending a conference should generate some good networking.  Making advance appointments with key people at the conference is better.  But the best networking often happens over a period of time with a select group of people.  Example: many CEOs know that investing in a one-day CEO Dialogue experience will develop strategic relationships with like-minded people.

Check out the new CEO Dialogues, Inc. website.  One-day roundtables are planned for Feb. 17 (Orlando) and March 12 (Palm Springs, Calif.).

In our Management Buckets Workshop Experience, you’ll enrich your sales competencies and relate them to the practical insights from The People Bucket.  The 20 buckets cover the 20 Critical Competencies Required for Leading and Managing Today’s Nonprofit Organization.

Email me to reserve space in the May 9-10 Management Buckets workshop or the May 11 Nonprofit Board Governance workshop, both planned for Orange County, California.

 

 

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
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1. Today we’re going to create your Intentional Networking List.  Look at your “I know what I don’t know” list—and identify the people who can help you advance.

2. When you have been strategic with your networking in the past (good, better, best), what has resulted?

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Download the Management Buckets brochure


 

 

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