I was recently asked by one of my readers if I thought that our profession in sales has changed.
My answer is both a quick “No” and a resounding all caps “HELL YES!”
No in the sense that the idea of assessing and identifying needs, presenting solutions, gaining commitment etc have always been a part 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).

Someone pursued me for a while to do business with them and quite frankly . . . I think they did a great job!
So great, that I signed up for their service.
I noticed that once I signed up, I would get various things that equated to upgrading and spending more money with them but . [...]

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).

In today’s modern world with the internet presence of businesses skyrocketing, it’s important to maintain proper security protocol to safeguard the personal information and privacy of yourself,  your business, your staff and your customers. The websites designed by inConcert comply with both the Mass Privacy laws and also comply with PCI rules when producing eCommerce websites. Check out the Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries website for more details about Massachusetts internet laws and online policies.

As for PCI DSS 2.0 Compliance, eCommerce websites developed, hosted and maintained by inConcert Web Solutions are  PCI Compliant as is required by the merchant services company. If a client decides to host and maintain their own website we can not guarantee PCI Compliance upon release of the website. Sometimes we have clients who use other hosting services, or maintain their own websites while we provide hosting. We always do our best to help each of our clients, of course, and recommend ways to keep their websites PCI Compliant (if they are not already doing so).

Upon completion of the eCommerce website, the site is reviewed and approved by the merchant services company for PCI Compliance before the site can be released. There are 12 standard rules of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) that our websites, hosting and maintenance conform to.

This includes but is not limited to:

• hosting on a fully PCI compliant dedicated server
• firewall protection
• a dedicated ip address with a 2048 bit encrypted SSL Certificate
• complex passwords and password storage redundancies
• server virus protection
• restriction of physical access to cardholder data
• unique user access IDs
• access logging

Even one breach of your website’s security can do serious damage to your company’s reputation. If your website doesn’t meet PCI standards, you should definitely take action to protect yourself and others as soon as possible. For more information on this topic, read our earlier blog article about security standards.

1)    Don’t Post And Run: By far one of the quickest ways to look like a tool. Call me crazy but I actually have this as one of our rules in my Linkedin group. Aside from bad manners, your discussion has a greater chance of dying and dropping off of page one which doesn’t do much for [...]

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).

Want a cool way to stand out with your prospects/clients?
Try leveraging holidays in your sales mix!
Here are three quick and easy ways for you to make it happen!
Leverage the holiday as a an opportunity to change up your messaging.
For example, you could send cards out on to all the Moms that you know of on [...]

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).

Want a cool way to stand out with your prospects/clients?
Try leveraging holidays in your sales mix!
Here are three quick and easy ways for you to make it happen!
Leverage the holiday as a an opportunity to change up your messaging.
For example, you could send cards out on to all the Moms that you know of on [...]

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).

Whatever you do, repeatedly and consistently over time gets linked to YOU.
This can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing.
The bad part of this is that you might be in a situation, right now, where you are being misunderstood by . . .
Your prospects
Your customers
Your teammates
All because you are engaging in [...]

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).

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 . . [...]

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).

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.