Game Changing Half-Time Strategies:  Coach Your Team Like a Champion By Frank Hurtte It’s June 30th. The 2025 half-time buzzer is about to sound. Whether you’re up, down, or locked in a defensive struggle, it’s time for a gut-check. Distributors, this is your moment to reassess, realign, and get back in the game. Since sports history is full of great half-time stories, let’s take a few minutes to reflect on some momentous events and the power of a pause. Your sales team might benefit from the same kind of mid-game magic.   Super Bowl LI, 2017: The New England Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons by 18 points. At halftime, head coach Bill Belichick and his coaching staff made critical strategic adjustments to counter the Falcons' dominant performance. The result? One of the greatest comebacks in NFL history with the Patriots scoring 25 unanswered points to tie the game and force it into overtime. Ultimately, the Patriots won Super Bowl LI in the first-ever overtime Sup...

Sink, Swim… or Go for the Onboarding Gold By Desiree Grace Onboarding is often treated like an afterthought. It should be an event, a meaningful, well-planned one. But too often, organizations fail to invest the time, thought, or discipline into welcoming new employees effectively. Worse yet, a sloppy onboarding experience can give your new hire a bad case of buyer’s remorse.   Want your onboarding to feel more Olympic podium than office hazing ritual? Want positive morale, enthusiastic employees, and maybe even a glowing Glassdoor review? Let’s dive into best practices for turning your onboarding into a gold-medal performance.   1. Culture: Show, Don’t Just Tell What do you really want your new hire to understand? Beyond the slick video about corporate values, how do you actually live your culture? If your meetings start and end on time, model that. If your team genuinely cares about one another, show it. Introduce the new hire to colleagues, ask your CSR about...

Your Organization’s Makeover: More Than Just Wallpaper! By Desiree Grace Some companies reorganize as often as my Mother would redecorate, meaning, every 3 years or as styles changed. In the case of Mother, it was her passion to redecorate and keep up with the latest trends in interior design. Some companies develop costly habits by following the latest trends in organizational design. In both cases, it's not advisable to blindly follow trends without justification. There should be a logical reason for making changes, such as a shift in the needs of the family or the company that necessitates a redesign. If your corporate strategy or target market has changed, that might be a good impetus to check your current structure against your strategy. A few examples will illustrate the point. Let’s say your new CEO has been charged with improving profits. He or she might look for redundant functions within the expensive VP, SVP, and C-suite functions. If your functions overlap, that c...

Turning Likes into Gold: Measuring Your Social Success A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment By Desiree Grace You know you need it- a social media strategy. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or even a Substack newsletter, if you aren’t on social media, you simply don’t exist . The age-old marketing conundrum, however, is how to measure what’s working in this newer world. In traditional advertising, you paid for a television ad, you monitored the Nielsen ratings, and you knew how many households were exposed to your message (reach) and how often (frequency). It’s a bit different with social media. First, you have media you own . This is the most similar to ye olde TV ad. Your company’s Facebook page or LinkedIn account- that’s owned. You control what goes in, and you can measure how many people visit, how long they stay (how “sticky” your page is), and even completion rates, like whether they finished that “about us” video. The good news is that you can measure and mo...

Leave Them Alone and Let Them Sell? Are You Out of Your Mind? An angry man's rant By Frank Hurtte Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve masochistically subjected myself (voluntarily, mind you) to a greasy, day-old buffet of podcasts, think-pieces, and smug online lectures from sales "experts" who believe the solution to all of life’s problems is to just leave salespeople alone. “Let them do what feels best,” they coo, or maybe spew, like back-alley dope pushers. If it feels good, do it. “No need to manage them. Don’t you dare ask what they’re doing. And for the love of God, don’t mention CRM.” It’s an exhaustingly long-winded sermon of anti-accountability. And like the Jonestown cult, the Kool-Aid line is long. Looking back, I wish I’d made a list of those slobbering all over themselves in the amen corner of the comment section. Note to self: deprogram them before even reading their resume, much less hiring them. Rather than yelling at my screen or punching drywa...

Clean Up on Aisle Sales: Segmenting Customers and Attitudes By Desiree Grace A funny thing happened on a customer segmentation journey: trash talk, bad behavior, and customer attitudes were exposed. Say what? Yep, when you start dissecting your customers and how you should be treating them, internal dysfunction often slides into the spotlight too. Here’s what happened: I was working with a client, whom we’ll call Zac, who had no customer segmentation in place. That meant every customer was treated the same way. There was no distinction between great, good, or frankly, terrible customers. They all received the same terms, attention, responsiveness... you name it. As you might guess, this was not sustainable. So, Zac and I collaborated on building a customer rubric —a list of qualities to evaluate and score his customers. This helped segment them into tiers, which in turn dictated how they would be managed. Would they be contacted monthly, semi-monthly, or quarterly? Would t...