In order to embrace today’s post you have to know what a “SNIOP” is!
According to Zig Ziglar, a SNIOP is a person who is Subject to the Negative Influence of Other People!
Things like . . .
Letting others rain on your parade or
Steal your joy or
Gun down your ideas and the all time favorite . . […]

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Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

Back in 2010 I set a goal to start utilizing video in my “Castain 2.0” branding strategy and guess what?
I completely wussed out!
I put it off, blew it off and always had really good reasons for not getting to it.
Bottom line . . . I was scared folks!
I was scared of all the things I […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

You were just presented with a brand spankin new week . . . Now what?
Will it be the same old, same old?
Same old stuff . . . different day?
Or will you take charge and consider changing things up a bit?
In this week’s podcast, I’ll offer several tips to help you . . .
Change Up Your […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

Of all the places for us to get a lesson . . . Our remote?
Yep and I thought I’d change things up and offer you a valuable lesson via a quick, 2 minute video I shot . . . especially for you. Well sort of, especially for you and anyone who actually takes the 2 […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

One of our Linkedin Group members posed an interesting question today.
He was knee deep in an outbound call when a prospect randomly asked him a ridiculous question (that had nothing to do with what they were talking about) and then hung up on him before he could answer.
It reminds me of one of my first cold […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

Don’t do this: Don’t automatically respond with “how much higher?” or “where do we need to be on this?” Doing so relinquishes control, put’s you on the defensive, diminishes the value of your widget and as a bonus, you sound like everyone else!
Put it into a context: Instead of defending your position, have the other […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

The web browser statistics have been released through March 2012. The stats are published monthly at W3CSchools.com.

Below are the web browser stats for March 2012.

To sum these results up, people who use older versions of Internet Explorer are declining steadily in number, while Internet Explorer 9 is seeing a slight rise in popularity. Firefox usage continues to decline during the first few months of this year. Chrome is gaining a percentage point monthly in popularity. Safari usage numbers seem to be pretty stable as well as the small Opera crowd.

Recently I have come across a number of cases where the information on the Contact Page of a website is lacking important information or simply incorrect.  The reality is that it is your CONTACT page.  So you want people to be able to contact you.  Here are some things that I saw and that I pointed out to the website owners if I was able to get in touch with them:

• The Contact Page simply had a form on it and no other info; and the problem wasn’t the form, it was that I wanted to call them and I couldn’t find their phone number anywhere on the website.  Eventually, after looking, I found it on the About Us page of all places.
• Phone number listed was out of service
• The map that was on the page was showing an incorrect location
• The address was spelled wrong
• The phone number was a graphic and was not in Text format
• Email address is listed on the page

Here are some quick things you can do to ensure that your contact page is effective…

• Check your page for accuracy every quarter, it only takes 5 minutes
• Test your form every month, it only takes 2 minutes
• Make sure your phone number is in text format, this way all the new smart phones can read it and recognize that it is a phone number and the user can click to call
• Make sure your address information is complete
• If you have a map, check its location to be sure that the map application is up- to- date
• Remove all emails from the page, you will get more spam by showing your email on the page

I meet many people throughout many different networking events, some of which are members of their local chambers and some not.  What I have found to be very effective for me is to participate.  Yeah I know, you have heard that before, and it sounds so lame, but it’s true.  The more active you are, the more others will recognize not only who you are, but what you and your company do.  Like anything else, though, results will come over time and won’t happen right away.  So how do you make sure that you get results?  Here is my process, which I believe will work for anyone if done correctly:

1. Show up often
2. Show up early
3. Find compatible businesses that can you can refer business to
4. Setup a time with those businesses to learn more about them in depth
5. Talk about them, not you
6. Show up again
7. Make sure to find folks you have met with and greet them, thanking them for their time
8. Spend about 40%-50% of your networking time with folks you have met with before, no more.
9. Find and send referrals to people that you know, like and trust.
10. Referrals will come your way now!  Believe me…they will, just be patient!

This system works very well for me.  I continue to have success with it and will continue to work with the system because it works.  I look at the process about once each year to see if I need to tweak it at all.  One note:  Track your sales by referral source, this way you can pull a report at the end of each year to see which networking group is sending you the most business, as well as the least business.  Once you know this, you can now decide if you want to drop the group that sent you the least and spend more of that time in other places.

Take a look on your social network of choice and you will see an endless sea of “stuff”.
Most of it is just that . . . “stuff”.
Meanwhile, we try to do our best to keep our network updated via our status updates and guess what . . .
We fail to stand out!
There are lots of […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

I might have caught you red freakin handed . . .
Knee deep in doing what you’ve always done and perhaps being the creature of habit we all default to.
STOP!
Do something different to move yourself closer to your goals!
Try something different!
Challenge your default routine!
Be willing to BE DIFFERENT and create a difference in your customer’s experience […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

There was a time when I didn’t believe in using headsets and in retrospect it was an “ego” thing.
When I launched my business last year, I decided to lose the ego and suite up with proper phone gear.
There are 3 reasons why I enjoy using a headset, let’s get the obvious one out of the […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

One of the biggest challenges many people have when “hitting the phones” is a little thing called “sounding scripted”. This week . . . we’re going there girlfriend!
I offer several tips to help you lose the script
Lose the whole sounding mechanical thing and . . .
Increase your effectiveness on the phone!
Why don’t you scroll down […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

For those of you Spinal Tap fans out there, you know about the famous amp that can go to “11” . . . I thought this might be a really cool way for you to remember to really and truly HEAR people because . . .
At the core of every human being is a need […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).

There are 5 major mistakes that people make with regard to Linkedin invites.
Mistake #1 When you use that God awful template. I hate that template! It is by far the most anti social, social networking tool on Linkedin!
Here’s how it reads . . .
“I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”
So here […]

Go to Sales Playbook
Paul Castain is the Vice President of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics where he oversees the training and development of 700 sales Jedis.

Over the last 27 years, Paul has trained and mentored over 3,000 sales professionals, written sales training content for several Fortune 500 companies and is the author of Castain’s Sales Playbook (which just won a Sales Pop award for best sales website).