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...

Selling With Heart: The Things You Can't Teach     ⏱️ 4 min read By Jenny (May) Shannon My dad, a lifelong salesman, passed away 5 years ago today. The timing always feels off, with the anniversary landing just after Father’s Day. But grief doesn’t have a calendar. Fortunately, this isn’t about grief. Frank likes to say no one is born a natural salesperson. And he’s right, for the most part. Most sales skills must be taught. But my dad was the exception that proves the rule. My dad was a lot of things: a salesman, a community builder, a man of faith, a guy who could make friends in the grocery store line, and someone who believed a bowl of ice cream could fix almost anything. He lived big, right up to the day he took his last ride on his Goldwing and finished his final scoop of chocolate. He sold for IFP long before CRM systems, smartphones, or even the idea of work-life balance. He carried a StarTac until we practically pried it out of his hands. He never met a stranger...

The Five North Stars of Value‑Driven Selling In a previous article, I argued that the biggest barrier to value‑driven selling isn’t compensation or field capability. It’s a leadership mindset. Let's be real, you can’t train your way out of a leadership problem. Many distributor leaders say they want value‑driven selling, yet they continue rewarding behavior rooted in reactionary, relationship‑based selling. They ask for new outcomes while protecting the old model. Let's face it, it's hard to move forward when your incentives are stuck in the Clinton era.  Back in the prehistoric days of the 1990s, at least if you measure by the absence of email, smartphones, or Google, I found myself wrestling with the same problem. After some soul‑searching, I developed five “North Stars” to guide how we should operate.  At the time, I wasn’t trying to define value‑driven selling. I was trying to keep the business from sliding into commodity territory. It wasn’t a theory. It was a necessit...

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...