I Could Never Sell

Week of April 1 A friend my age died this month. Heart failure. In the mid-nineties he built a computer consulting company in the Garment District in Manhattan, building some of the first Internet database applications for companies like McGraw-Hill. He was a pioneer, and for years I tried to follow the path he scouted. [...]

Week of March 25 Adventures in Aversion, we could have called this blog. People buy from people they like, and Aversion is the first reason sales fail. Invisibly. We look away from Aversion, and don’t see. The less you like me, the less you’ll understand what I like. You won’t know you don’t know. You’ll [...]

Week of March 18 What Makes People Give? asks the New York Times. Behavioral Economics looks at why people give to charities and causes. Turns out their giving and their buying are puzzles of the same kind. For example, do matching gifts make people give more? Where, for example, a big donor offers to match [...]

Week of March 18 There’s the head of Cost Accounting sitting in a hotel bar. Nice hotel. Late Saturday night. Front row table on the main aisle. The red carpet seat. Young women pass in shimmering party clothes. Lovers would sit far to the back, away from this mahogany and brass rail. The Cost Accountant [...]

Week of March 11 When Ugh and Adze grew old enough to carry spears, they took a marketing course. “What business are you in?” the instructor asked. “I hunt,” said Ugh. “I make spears,” said Adze. Ugh took his spear to the waterhole from dawn to dark every day. When he got a groundhog or [...]

Week of March 4 In Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch shows why a big part of the ideal client profile lies in understanding what your clients value, fear, want, need, and dream about. For a deeper level of understanding of your clients: I think you can tell a lot about how a person approaches life [...]