We are all in the business of sales. Teachers sell students on learning, parents sell their children on making good grades and behaving, and traditional salesmen sell their products.
Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can't cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.
Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
My dad used to sell a type of commodity contract. It was so complicated, he was certain his sales people didn't understand what they were selling.
We hired a CSR person at Twitter, years before we hired our first sales person, to make sure we had a culture and impact of doing good.
Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.
I love working with customers. Sales has really influenced everything I do. It has instilled in me the important traits of operating with a sense of urgency and listening to people.
We initially targeted pager networks, which have been suffering for the last decade due to cell phone sales.
There is no prize in sales for second place. It's win or nothing. The masters know this and strive for - they fight for - that winning edge.
Most of my career has been in sales. I spend 50% or more of my time with customers and employees, and I can't wait for it to be more than 50%.
I worked in ad sales. I would call up local businesses and try to get them to buy ads in the paper. The whole time, I felt like I was just scamming people.
Kaffee: This is a sales pitch. It's not going to be won by the law, it's going to be won by the lawyers.
Lilja: Do you want to buy anything? Woman at yard sale: There's nothing to buy here!
Hamm: Yes, sir, we're next month's garage sale fodder for sure.
I've been entrepreneurial since middle school. I was always arranging bake sales, dances and school trips to raise money for the Dalton School.
[reading newspaper headlines] Rex Kramer: Passengers certain to die! Steve McCroskey: Airline negligent. Johnny: There's a sale at Penney's!
Caroline: Who knew that, in between bake sales, my mother was Anaïs Nin?
Of all the big Internet companies, Yahoo is the most highly valued on a price-earnings and price-sales basis.
I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, not manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation.
Is the competition really some mythical beast? No, not really. Knowing how to play your group of salespeople as a team, to overcome the group objective of winning the customers support, is the objective. The opposing team in proper viewpoint is not j...
The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an act of disdain, a hostility to the poor common reade...
