Half the time when you're buyer asks for a proposal, you're about to walk into a trap. Here's how to avoid that.

Most meetings should have been an email, and most emails are way too dense, over-complete, and they make you look needy.  You're throwing haystacks at people, expecting them to find the needle. And that's why you get ghosted.

Oh right. So that's why you don't do followup.

If you're selling something, you have one job.

Yes, they might have the money. But how does that mean they're going to spend it?

Oh look, I coined a cheesy term.  But if you use it in your sales and marketing, you probably land more buyers.

Yeah of course they have the problem and they want to solve it - but very often they can't or won't, and they're only talking to you so that they look like they're working on a solution. And then you waste your time on a buyer's problem-solving theatre.

When a buyer becomes a client, they become a tenant in your head. Shouldn't someone pay the rent...?

You can tell yourself stories about how likely all those deals are to close until your bankrupt - and if you do tell yourself stories about it, you might be closer to ruin than you think. Be discerning, and careful not to fall into wishful thinking.

Niching down? Aim narrow, welcome wide.

Just like that friend who's always "doing one final rewrite before sending my manuscript to the publisher!". You don't follow up because you don't want to face the fact that things don't look as rosy as you're hoping?

Every machine can be a smoke machine, provided you use it wrong enough.

You don't have a sales problem: you have a leadership problem.

An excellent breakdown of AI art from The Oatmeal (with the killer phrase "emotional nutrition") theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Everything is downstream from your internal state. Protect it with all your might.

I miss the days of stock photography. I so much prefer seeing people who actually are dead inside, instead of people who just look like they are.

Sure, go ahead and invest in outreach, Business Development, networking, content marketing... but don't forget to dig up the opportunities hiding in your network, first.  Check out the MYNO mini-series here: salesfornicepeople.com/academy/mine-y…

i have watched ZERO reels/netflix/youtube/podcasts in 8 days; it’s insane how your phone becomes boring when you actively put in effort to make your real life interesting