Keeping Score—The Best Sales Motivator
By Ken DiPrima
Management consultants having been preaching, for years, how important it is for a business to measure all of its activities, from a complete breakdown of all receipts, expenditures, time to complete specific tasks; to everything vital needed to produce and deliver a product or service. The purpose of this is to give a business the necessary information to manage every aspect of the business towards attaining profitability.
Sales people who do not follow this same sort of discipline, while managing their activities, lose valuable opportunities to maximize their income, make their job more satisfying, and provide their company with the …
GPS Reviews: Tackled The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
By 
Situation
Husband and wife owners of drug, alcohol, and paternity testing service with three locations, hired GPS for a strategic planning project “concerning our lives, business and future.”
Process
“What an awesome journey,’ shared the wife. “We have looked at the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our GPS consultant has helped us with the ugly, making sure that we realized that it was not all our fault. This means the world to us, because we wanted to take the blame for all of it. You helped us to understand that it doesn’t matter, we just go forward from here …
Taking Our Food Drive To New Heights!
Sears? Willis? Nope, it’s the ‘Cereal’ Tower!
Inspired by canstruction, we built our own sculpture to launch our annual Food Drive at GPS. Last year, we featured the American flag, which is pretty hard to top, both thematically and design-wise, but we finally arrived at our Cereal Tower concept (based on a famous Chicago skyscraper, one of the tallest buildings in the world).
Thinking Inside the Box!
Cans are a terrific way to package non-perishable food, but we experienced some issues with stability when building using cans. Going higher wasn’t possible without some sort of infrastructure not made …
How A New Perspective Revolutionized Automotive Manufacturing
By Tom Ryan
Most people learn from their history books that Henry Ford revolutionized the manufacture of automobiles by introducing a moving assembly line in order to increase production and lower costs. This is true. What the history books don’t reveal is that this idea was NOT Henry Ford’s!
Here’s the real story behind how Henry Ford utilized a new viewpoint to ‘assemble’ cars, which ultimately changed history:
The idea actually came from William ‘Pa’ Klann, one of Ford’s engineers, who had visited the Swift & Company’s slaughterhouse in Chicago. There, Klann had viewed what he called a ‘disassembly line’ for dressing beef. …
GPS Reviews: I Have My Excitement Back
Situation
The owner of a RV dealership was contacted by GPS “and asked if they could take a look at our business to see if we could be more profitable. I have to admit that I was a little reluctant about someone coming into my business, which I have lived for the past 40 years, and tell me what I could do to make more money.
I did know that we were not taking full advantage of the opportunities that were blessing our family business. I was ready to call it quits, I had been working 12 or 13 hours …
Thanksgiving & Giving Thanks In Sales
By Ken DiPrima
As the holiday season unfolds around us, and thoughts of family gatherings, social parties, and gift giving begin to fill our minds, it may be a perfect time to examine and evaluate the bounties of the year just past.
How appropriate it is that we celebrate Thanksgiving, first. The past year has been filled with joy and sorrow. It brought great wealth as well as financial woes. It supplied affirmation of good health for some, while disclosing terrible illness to others. It welcomed new acquaintances in our lives and lost a few, perhaps, even to death.
Most of us experienced …
We Supported Miss Wadsworth’s Team For NephCure!
Martha’s daughter Emily was diagnosed with a disease of the kidneys in December 2011. She has experienced many complications and numerous hospitalizations. At this time, there is no cure. As the current Miss Wadsworth, Emily led a team at the NephCure Walk to fund further research towards discovering new treatments and, hopefully, a cure.
Emily poses with two young NephCure Walk participants.
Team Miss Wadsworth: Emily poses with her friend Mikayla and brother
Teddy (on the left), along with her parents, Kevin and Martha, and one of the
Wadsworth Pageant Directors, Sharon (on the right).
Ms Illinois also made …
Overcoming Sales Slumps Using Your F.E.A.R.
By Ken DiPrima
Someone once asked Pete Rose, who recorded more base hits than anyone in the history of baseball, how he handled batting slumps. Rose looked quizzically at the person, paused for a moment and proclaimed that anyone performing at his level would consider one bad swing to be a batting slump. The answer was just to step out of the batters box, regroup, and become fully prepared for the next pitch.
Anyone who ever made a living as a salesperson knows what is a sales slump. Not everyone knows how to break out of one.
I attended a sales management conference, …
GPS Reviews: Leading Us To Victory
Situation
Client in the trucking/freight/warehouse logistics industry “started the journey with GPS,” to position the company for future growth.
Process
“At the time, I had reservations with the time commitment, other people in my office, and the project cost. My concern was that I was already drowning in my business, how would I ever have the time to take this on? I’m sure that these feelings are mutual with other clients, however, my feelings were put to bed during the consulting process.”
The GPS analyst and consultant “worked very diligently, the first couple days, analyzing the business and our practice. …
Is Your Business Friendly?
By Zach Miller
Thumbtack, a consumer service for finding and hiring local businesses, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on education and entrepreneurship, recently released the results of their Small Business Friendliness Survey. The study measured data from over 12,000 small business owners and provides insight regarding the impact of friendliness towards customers as it relates to a business’ overall success.
This study demonstrates the importance between business friendliness and business success, as the former is directly correlative to customer loyalty, according to the survey.
For many businesses, in both B2B and B2C, customer loyalty is determined by …
