All salespeople know how to sell. Sometimes, though, they sell themselves on ideas that just aren’t sound. It’s time to stop kidding yourself about your selling.
Sales Truth #1: Know who is and who is not a true prospect.
Start by being honest with yourself about who is and who is not a true prospect for you. Unless you are going to change something about your product, your process, your delivery, or you, you can expect the same results you’ve gotten in the past.
Well that took no time at all. Intelligence agencies rolled right into the horror and fury in the immediate wake of the latest co-ordinated terror attacks in the French capital on Friday, to launch their latest co-ordinated assault on strong encryption — and on the tech companies creating secure comms services — seeking to scapegoat end-to-end encryption as the enabling layer for extremists to perpetrate mass murder.
There’s no doubt they were waiting for just such an ‘opportune moment’ to redouble their attacks on encryption after recent attempts to lobby for encryption-perforating legislation foundered. (A strategy confirmed by a leaked email sent by the intelligence community’s top lawyer, Robert S. Litt, this August — and subsequently obtained by the Washington Post — in which he anticipated that a “very hostile legislative environment… could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement”. Et voila Paris… )
Four years ago, police started evicting Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park in New York City.
Justin Wedes remembers it well. It was one of several times he was arrested for protesting as an Occupy Wall Street leader.
“I think there’s a general sentiment, even amongst many on Wall Street, that our current political and economic system isn’t working,” says Wedes, who has now returned to his hometown of Detroit.
The Occupy tent cities are gone, but the movement has had a lingering effect on American politics — and even Wall Street itself.
Nearly two decades ago, PayPal transformed the world of e-commerce by offering to mask a user’s credit card information for online transactions. Today, that baton could easily pass to Stripe, a San Francisco-based payments startup founded by two young Irish entrepreneurs, brothers John and Patrick Collison.
Over the past 12 months, five-year-old Stripe has moved from the cutting edge in financial software development to mainstream awareness for businesses. It’s raked in tens of millions of venture capital; sealed important payments deals with prominent companies; and brought on high-profile executives who should help the company grow and scale.
But when he showed up, he was surprised to find himself in a conference room full of familiar faces. The Mayo Clinic had assembled an all-star team of about a dozen computer jocks, investigators from some of the biggest cybersecurity firms in the country, as well as the kind of hackers who draw crowds at conferences such as Black Hat and Def Con. The researchers split into teams, and hospital officials presented them with about 40 different medical devices. Do your worst, the researchers were instructed. Hack whatever you can.
Like the printers, copiers, and office telephones used across all industries, many medical devices today are networked, running standard operating systems and living on the Internet just as laptops and smartphones do. Like the rest of the Internet of Things—devices that range from cars to garden sprinklers—they communicate with servers, and many can be controlled remotely. As quickly became apparent to Rios and the others, hospital administrators have a lot of reasons to fear hackers. For a full week, the group spent their days looking for backdoors into magnetic resonance imaging scanners, ultrasound equipment, ventilators, electroconvulsive therapy machines, and dozens of other contraptions. The teams gathered each evening inside the hospital to trade casualty reports.
v.19 n. 46 – Released November 12, 2015
Podcaster and author James Altucher recently stopped by Business Insider to talk about his provocative blog post about whether or not owning a home is a smart investment.
Altucher is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, angel investor and former hedge fund manager. His podcast and blog teach the lessons he’s learned about money, health and happiness after having it all, losing it, and getting it back again.
Typically, entertainers travel by limo to the red carpet at awards shows. Granger Smith is not normal. He insisted on traveling to the recent Country Music Awards red carpet in a Chevy Silverado. It’s authentically who he is: Smith has always owned a Silverado and it’s what his “customers” expect from him.
It reminded me of a similar incident 20 years earlier at the ACM awards. Alan Jackson walked the red carpet in jeans and a T-shirt. The show producers told Jackson to “play along” with a pre-recorded track. Jackson disagreed, so he had his drummer play along without drumsticks as a weird way of clueing in his audience. He walked away with the male vocalist of the year award and I would argue his authenticity is precisely why fans love him.
The more we drive with GPS—or walk down the sidewalk staring at directions on a smartphone—the less we’re able to navigate on our own. Relying on navigational tech might even make the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles memory, shrink a little.
A set of maps from designer Archie Archambault might help us rebuild the mental maps of cities that we’re starting to lose. Instead of a literal grid of streets, he maps out neighborhoods and the basic parts of a city the way someone who lives there might think of it, or at least the way they probably did before Google Maps existed.
When my younger brother and I went trick-or-treating as kids at Halloween, he was scared of kids dressed as ghosts. When he was very young, he had eye surgery a couple of times. All of the OR people wore white. He associated their white dress and the white sheets of “the ghosts” with pain.
Like him, we can associate the ghosts of business pain past with present opportunities. We often fear stepping up into them because of our past failures.
Here are 3 Positive Strategies to Transform Business Fear so you Work Positive this week:
Dispatches From The Front 