How do you know who will make it in sales? Millions are spent annually on assessments and interviews to determine where the talent lives and who can help build sales success. With that level of investment, it is really important that we measure the right things. Many companies measure experience, while others measure mostly aptitude…. Read More
About Jim Cathcart
11 Powerful Ways to Expand Your Life This Year
Define your future. Describe the life you’d like to live. The future you see defines the person you’ll need to be. Identify the traits and qualities you’d like to acquire. Think bigger than yourself. An acorn that only thinks as an acorn will never become a mighty oak. Stretch yourself. You are undoubtedly capable of… Read More
21 Great Sales Ideas
(Excerpted from Relationship Selling: The 8 Competencies Of Top Sales Producers) Prepare Yourself To Excel. Use a checklist to prepare your mind, appearance, customer information, company and product information and the selling environment, so you can be at your best on every call. Manage Your Sales Reputation. Determine today how you want to be thought… Read More
21 Ways to Increase Sales This Year
Prepare Yourself To Excel Use a checklist to prepare your attitude, appearance, customer information, company and product information and the selling environment, so you can be at your best on every call. Notice What Is Working Study yourself, your product or service and your company to know what is working now. Reinforce the actions and… Read More
Can He or She Sell?
The first challenge in building a sales organization or career is to find a sales person. If you assume that anyone can be trained to succeed in sales you might be sorely disappointed. Many are suited to sales and many are not. Training a poorly suited candidate very well will not produce a high performing… Read More
Fire them Up? or Not?
If you light a fire under a snail, you’ll get escargot! Everyone has a personal velocity, a pace and intensity at which they work best. If you over-challenge them, they progress from stress to anxiety to burnout. On the other hand, if you under-challenge them they will go from boredom to apathy to depression. We… Read More
How to Create High-Value Relationships
It’s time we started seeing Relationships through a Strategic perspective. This is not Relationships as Skill, but rather as Strategy. There is a direct correlation between the number of strategically valuable relationships in your life and your level of success. It is not about “what you know” or “who you know” but rather about “which… Read More
How to Create the Will to Win
Olympic Gymnastic Champion Peter Vidmar told me, “My goal was to train about 15 more minutes than the rest of my teammates. That little extra focus over a few years led to some perfect 10s at the Olympic Games. Perfection does take time… (so) see what 15 (extra) minutes a day can do for you.”… Read More
How to Use Public Speaking to Build Your Business
In 1989 I was sitting in the first row on a plane from Washington, DC to Dallas. At the last minute a passenger boarded and took the seat beside me. I said hello and introduced myself. He smiled, shook my hand and said, “I’m Jim Wright.” I replied, “this is a great coincidence.” He asked,… Read More
Rethinking Week
Preparing for a new era of growth “There ought to be one time each year when you pull out all the stops and see just how good you can be.” Joe D. Willard, CLU I agree with Joe. Once each year we ought to really go for it. He has successfully followed his own advice… Read More
Self-Reliance – The Heart of Every Successful Organization
When first-timer Javier couldn’t keep up with the 18 other fitness hikers we encouraged him to return to the trailhead. He said, “No, I’ll be along in a while. I just need to slow down.” Twenty minutes later nobody had seen him on the trail and all of us abandoned our hike to become a… Read More
Take A Day to Think About It
“Without reflection there is no true learning”, Kevin Buck, philosopher, author When’s the last time you took a day to just review what you know, where you’re going and what to do next? They say that the essence of intelligence is the ability to make distinctions, to notice the differences, to see more than the… Read More
Teach People What To Want
My colleague Daniel Burrus, technology researcher and futurist, said, “It’s a mistake to assume that people know what they might want. If they don’t know what’s possible, they will ask for too little.” Brilliant! A big part of our sales job is showing the possibilities. Most people don’t think beyond their daily experience, they don’t… Read More
The Dark Side of Enablement
There’s a popular word in sales circles today called “enablement.” To enable something means to make it more able, more likely to occur. Naturally, we all want to make sales more likely. But there’s a dark side to enablement too. What truly makes sales more likely is having one or more people personally committed to… Read More
The Rise & Fall of Self-Reliance in America
Publisher Ray Stendall of Customer Engagement magazine interviewed me recently for the feature article in his magazine. Self Reliance Report I think you’ll find this topic compelling. We are exploring what the problem is and how it can be addressed. The more people in a society who are self-reliant, the more independent they can be and… Read More
What if it costs twice as much?
I love cars. I do. All of my life I’ve had a love affair with automobiles. My first car was an old beaten up 1950 Plymouth 4 door…but it was mine! The engine was bad, the floors rusted, and the upholstery ruined…but…mine. Dad and I spent months working in our driveway to bring that old… Read More
What Is Your Biggest Sales Challenge? Could It Be You?
Over the past 42 years I’ve worked with 3,100 different clients around the world and, in all the new calls I get, the number one sales challenge worldwide is still: Getting the sales person to do what is needed. I’m not saying people don’t work, nor that they don’t work hard. I’m just saying that… Read More