A Perfect Failure Part 4: Expecting Your Suppliers to be Perfect 🕒 2 min read By Frank Hurtte Expecting perfection from suppliers is like expecting the weather forecast to be right every day. Helpful, usually. Perfect, never. Some salespeople expect the regional sales manager to know every answer, the application engineer to solve technical problems with a snap of the fingers, and the factory to deliver every order the next day, come rain, shine, or global supply-chain crisis. That's a fairy tale, not a reality. I've worked with hundreds of manufacturer representatives over my career. A few were exceptional. A few probably couldn't be trusted to water houseplants. Most fell somewhere in between. The common denominator wasn't perfection. They were all human beings trying to serve customers in an imperfect world. Customers don't judge us by whether our suppliers occasionally stumble. They judge us by how well we respond when the organic material hits the rotat...

A Perfect Failure: Expecting Your Company to Be Perfect (Part 3 of 6) 🕒 2 min read By Frank Hurtte People inside your company are prone to making mistakes. The warehouse ships the wrong part. Customer service transposes two numbers. Accounting sends an invoice that leaves everyone scratching their heads. Inside sales misunderstands a purchase order. It happens. Such are the travails of working with humans. One of the biggest surprises of my career was discovering that customers are generally more forgiving than salespeople expect. They understand mistakes happen because they run businesses too. What they don't tolerate is finger-pointing, excuses, or silence. I once watched a salesperson spend fifteen minutes proving a mistake wasn't his fault. By the time he finished, he'd convinced the customer nobody else inside his company could be trusted either. Accountability has rescued more customer relationships than perfection ever has. Companies don't earn loyalty by avoid...

A Perfect Failure: Wait Until You Catch Up (Part 2 of 6) 🕒 2 min read By Frank Hurtte Every salesperson on the planet shares the same fantasy. Someday, they're going to get caught up. Every email will be answered. Every quote will be completed. Every CRM record will be updated. Every voicemail will be returned. They'll finally lean back in their chair, admire a perfectly organized desk, and shout hurrah. Here I sit, almost five decades into my career, and that day has never arrived. I leave the office with twenty emails in my inbox and return the next morning to find sixty. I'm convinced my to-do list breeds after dark. Nobody has explained the biology. How does 20 become 60 overnight? Quotes multiply. Meetings appear on the calendar without permission. Customers somehow develop emergencies while I'm sleeping. If you're waiting until you've caught up before you begin prospecting, you've unintentionally created a permanent excuse. Successful salesp...

Choose Your Channel Wisely (Or End Up in a Dead End) A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment 🕒 3 min read By Desiree Grace Would you go on a road trip or a boat trip without a map or GPS? Sounds foolhardy and a little scary, too. Nobody wants to run out of gas or end up in a fleabag motel. When communicating with your customers, you need the advertising equivalent of a map : the communication model and a clear sense of direction . You need to know where your customers are and where you’re going. That’s where channel choice matters. Would you try newspaper classifieds to reach Gen Z? Would you contact industrial hand‑tool customers on Instagram? Of course not. These ridiculous examples illustrate the importance of understanding the Communication Model. Good communication means defining the correct target market, refining your message, speaking to people in their language, amplifying your message above the noise or clutter, paying attention to feedback, and, for today’s discussio...

A Perfect Failure Series Part 1: Stop Waiting to Feel Ready to Sell 🕒 3 min read By Frank Hurtte Early in the research for my book, The New Sales Guy Project , a new seller (sales guy, salesperson...) asked me a question I’ve now heard a hundred times since. "How much do I need to know before I start calling on customers?" It's a reasonable question. Every new salesperson worries about making a fool of themselves. Nobody wants to stand in front of an important maintenance manager, a techno-centric engineer, or a busy plant manager and discover halfway through the conversation that they've forgotten the one specification that really matters. The fear is real, maybe even excruciating for some. Unfortunately, the answer isn't all that soothing. "You’ll never know enough." For someone fresh out of a grueling engineering program, that thought was, shall we say, discouraging. But it's the reality of selling technical products. Forty-eight years ...

The “Situation” Every Leader Should Avoid " 🕒 3 min read  By Desiree Grace Your body’s hotter than a brothel in Guam." Singer‑songwriter Johnny Blue Skies drops this line in his song Situation , where he describes becoming infatuated with a woman, losing all good sense, and landing himself squarely in a “situation.” It’s a great song with an even better lesson. Give it a listen ,  though I cannot recommend the video . Johnny Blue Skies’ lyric captures the exact tension leaders face today: the pull of short‑term gratification versus the discipline required to make decisions that support long‑term organizational health. Some sales leaders and salespeople find themselves in a similar predicament when they become overly fixated on an attractive bonus. They forget that certain decisions require consideration of company goals, organizational alignment, and overall brand reputation. These situations are the professional equivalent of the aforementioned object of Johnny’s infatuat...