In the previous installment, I had promised to discuss making adjustments to the timeline as the project progresses. When it comes to project planning it’s important to be rigid yet flexible. While that sounds contradictory, just think of it as being Zen. (Editor’s note: See Part 1 of Lee Distad’s series on the almighty Gantt […]
If you’ve spent any time in sales in a professional setting, you’re likely to have had your boss ask you, “What do you have lined up?” In some work environments, it’s an informal check-in where your boss wants to know what you’re working on, to give him an idea of upcoming project scheduling and, more […]
What most often differentiates the AV pros who have the best reputations from the ones who, well… don’t is their ability to craft a complete experience for their clients. Accomplishing that requires a balance between the expertise needed to craft a well-designed system, the skills necessary to install it on time and on budget, but […]
While I work with a number of channels, the primary dealer channel I service is telecom. It was pretty low key and the media didn’t really make a big deal out of it so you might not know this but last week Apple announced the new iPhones for 2019. Anyway, on Friday I received an […]
I know I’m a little late celebrating Robbie Burns Day, which was at the end of January, but a line from one of his famous poems is a good intro to this column: “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a-gley.” What he meant was: “Things go wrong.” It’s a reality of […]
Business is almost always a team effort. All of us require a network of team members, all working on what they do best in order to make sure that the client is well taken care of. Building on that, there’s a very important social aspect to business. People don’t just do business with you because […]
You’re probably aware that business coaches are a whole thing now. Whatever skills or aptitudes you’re looking to sharpen, you can find and hire a coach who will help you learn what you need to know to improve on whatever it is you feel you need to improve on. There are any number of things […]
In the first installment, I had mentioned that Gantt charts used to take up an entire wall. That meant that they weren’t mobile, which required team meeting to be planned in the office where the Gantt chart lives. Now, with software solutions, you can take your project’s Gantt chart with you and your team can […]
There are some topics that get all the attention in the trade media. That’s usually because the subject is exciting or novel. Mostly those topics are product-related and form a constellation of gushing puff-pieces when exciting new products are launched. That’s not to say that every article about a new product is exciting. I once […]
One of the regular conversations I have with my clients involves leveraging Customer Relationship Management – CRM – tools to retain and engage their existing customer base in order to keep them coming back to spend money. How exactly that should be done is a lengthy conversation. The fact that it should be done is […]
I got a call from one of my dealers this week. That’s not unusual, someone calls me every day. That’s part of my job. “Lee, I have a problem.” — that was how the call began. What had happened was that he had driven out to a jobsite to install one of our cell boosters […]
There are a lot of ways to close a sale. The shelves of the business section of the bookstore are full of volumes on how to close more deals. Even when you account for the fact that every sales guru who puts up a shingle and starts selling books and seminars gives a different name […]
I’ve talked before about how my inbox is deluged every day with unsolicited product pitches — and most of them are garbage. I’m reminded on a daily basis of two key aphorisms. The first is Sturgeon’s Law: that 80% of everything is crap. The other, courtesy of tech entrepreneur James Altucher, is that “95% of […]
It’s important to be resilient. In this context, that means being prepared for the worst. Everyone knows Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” And there are others like, “The first casualty of every battle is the plan,” or “Every solution has two problems,” and of course, “You don’t need to go […]
I was recently meeting with one of my dealers and he expressed frustration at how may times he has to repeat himself on jobsites when communicating his requirements to trades like the electrician or the HVAC guy in order for them to do the thing he needs them to do, so he is able to […]
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the field troubleshooting systems. These days, as a distributor rep, I’m on the other end of the phone, fielding calls from dealers and helping them troubleshoot installations that use my hardware. Mostly, how I handle those calls is to walk through and confirm what they’ve already done: […]
Whether you’re working on improving yourself personally or professionally, it’s essential to have the ability to be introspective and analytical, in order to identify what you need to work on. That’s also true when you’re coaching others. In that, self-improvement has a lot in common with troubleshooting systems and equipment at work: diagnose, analyze, repair, […]
Some topics, when you review them every couple of years, you come to realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I remember all the prognostication ten years ago about cable cutters and the death of TV. Being me, I always took a more pragmatic, some might even say cynical, view. […]
Spring has sprung where I live, and that signaled the start of Spring Cleaning, both indoors and out. It was after cleaning out the garage and attempting to wash away all the grit from winter that I discovered that the hose bib had frost damage, and leaked into the basement when the tap was turned […]
One of my stock catchphrases when I re-share something on social media that I find odd or surprising is “Well, it turns out that haven’t actually seen everything yet.” That’s how I felt, and in fact keep feeling, when I see frequent mention in my newsfeed of this artist or that either releasing new material […]
Spend any amount of time coaching salespeople and you’ll quickly see commonalities amongst them. These include not only their strengths, but also, and maybe especially, their weaknesses. The most common trait salespeople share is fear of rejection. That’s not unusual. Everybody likes being accepted, few people seek rejection. And it’s a common, easy mistake to […]
It’s a truism that the first casualty of every battle is the plan. One of the realities of building things is that sometimes the plan gets changed. While ideally every eventuality gets considered and decided upon during the design and planning stages, we don’t live in an ideal world we live in this one. Consequently, […]
One of the topics I address regularly in meetings with my dealers is the pace of change, and that there are very few things you can count on to deliver top line and bottom line results long term. In these discussions I point out that the product categories I made a living on in the […]
I can’t think of two separate specialists on the jobsite whose work is more closely linked than the AV pros and the electricians. They’re so closely linked because even for small installations AV pros need to communicate with the electrician to specify locations and load capacity for the outlets that service their equipment. And with […]
Imagine my surprise when I received an email out the blue telling me that Ultraviolet, the movie library service will be ending its operations at the end of July 2019. Honestly, I’d mostly forgotten about Ultraviolet. So, curious after reading the email, I went to the website to learn more. Of course, first I had […]
If you’ve been in sales for a long time, you’ll have read a lot of books and articles on selling. And if you keep track of such things, you’ll notice that the majority of the time, the content focuses on cold calling: How to do it, and how to make it work. Conversely, there’s less […]
One of the most crucial pieces of advice I’ve ever received was, “Don’t decide for the client how much is too much. It’s not your job to say ‘no’ on their behalf.” Put another way, don’t be afraid of overselling the job; be afraid of underselling the job. This is a separate issue entirely from […]
One buzzword/acronym that gets thrown around a lot is CRM, short for customer relationship management. It can be a large, unwieldy concept and what CRM looks like for a business can be a lot like the parable of the five blind people, each trying to describe an elephant, by only touching one part of it. […]
The relationships between the various trades on a jobsite form a complex web of interdependencies. The two that are arguably the closest are the electrician and the AV pro. That makes sense, since on even small AV jobs the AV pro needs to specify locations and load capacities for the electrical outlets required for the […]
As I write this, Black Friday week has come and gone. The balloon has gone up, so to speak, on the holiday selling season. Regardless of which channel you work in and which side of the business you’re on, this time of year impacts you and you need to prepare accordingly. These days, working on […]
One of the joys of the AV business is that as networked-capability increases the performance potential of integrated AV, it also increases the complexity, which means increasing the potential for service issues. “Keep it simple,” is a great mantra to live by, but it only goes so far. However, network-connectivity cuts both ways and while […]
The connected era we live in is pretty amazing. A huge proportion of my job can be done by phone, text, and email. But there’s still replacement for meeting customers in-person. Even video conferencing isn’t quite the same. If you’re a sales rep there are a lot of good reasons to travel your territory and […]
