Selling is a craft. It’s a performance. It’s also a bit of a mystery. Why is it that two salespeople who work for the same manager have different results? Both salespeople sell the same thing, to similar clients, at the same price. If one salesperson complains about an underhanded competitor, another salesperson has little trouble dispatching that same competitor. Let’s agree to call this “the variability of individual results.”

“I like to point out strengths that my coworker brings to the table as part of the introduction to build confidence and credibility right away.” Have you taken your boss on a sales call recently? You could build two relationships simultaneously—one with your manager and a better one with the client. The more trust between you and the manager, the more opportunities may come your way. And your client may be impressed with the expert “team” you put in front of them to solve their problems.

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Early in my career, I worked in a company led by an inspiring and emotionally intelligent CEO. He often said, “If you love what you’re doing, you never have to work again.” I loved that idea. Most of us hate work. It’s a four-letter word. Hard work is why I left our family farm. Whenever a job began to feel like work, I quit. Fortunately, that’s only been a few times in my career. I’ve put decades of long hours into my career without really working.

Quite likely, the dominance of sports in modern American culture is only exceeded by the biggest non-athletic competition, politics. Kantar Media’s report on total US advertising expenditures for 2014 – a 0.7-percent increase to $141.2 billion – supports this conclusion, as it stated the increase was attributable to the Winter Olympics, World Cup and the mid-term elections. According to Kantar

Welcome to the lighter side of local media and marketing! Our cartoon collection is designed to give media managers, account executives, and ad agency pros a fresh, humorous way to connect with clients and colleagues. Whether you're breaking the ice, following up on a proposal, a clever way to say “I get it", or need a way to collect, these cartoons offer a memorable twist on the everyday challenges of selling, planning, creating or collecting. Think of them as conversation starters with a wink—and a nudge toward smarter, more relatable selling, collecting.

Benefit selling is a sales approach that emphasizes the results and value of a product or service. Rather than focusing on what an ad space is—such as a 30-second TV spot or a full-page magazine ad—it focuses on what it does for the client, like boosting brand recognition, increasing foot traffic, or generating leads.

Leading isn’t easy, and leading sales is one of the more difficult roles in business. Unlike some other leadership roles, there seem to be more variables in sales. Some of them include the sales effectiveness of the sales force, the economic environment, the nature of competition, and the variability that comes from trying to help people change their business results. This list of qualities is necessary for success, although there are others.

Retailers are moving beyond AI chatbots and beginning to deploy “agentic” AI that can take real actions, from marketing execution to customer-service workflows. As that shift accelerates, many are discovering that broad, general-purpose large language models often struggle with retail’s rule-heavy, SKU-level realities—where accuracy matters more than eloquence. Smaller, domain-specific language models trained on a retailer’s own verified data can deliver more reliable outputs for tasks like product content, attribute extraction, recommendations, and support automation. For local media sellers and agencies, the opportunity is to help advertisers turn first-party product and customer data into scalable, compliant creative and smoother campaign workflows—positioning themselves as operational partners, not just inventory vendors.

Realtor.com’s “Unpacking the Mover Mindset” reveals that movers are a high-value audience, making major purchase decisions within 90 days of relocating and showing increased openness to new brands and services. Local media outlets are uniquely positioned to connect advertisers with movers through trusted, community-based messaging. The Media Audit profiles newcomers and their media exposure. The Realtor.com report identifies three key phases of the mover journey—pre-move, move week, and post-move—and four mover personas, each with distinct needs and behaviors. Media sellers can capitalize on this by offering targeted ad packages, welcome guides, and geo-targeted campaigns aligned with mover timing and mindset. By leveraging these insights, local media can drive meaningful results for advertisers and deepen their role as essential partners in the community.

The Baby Boomers were much heralded; their children, Generation X, were somewhat ignored by comparison; and Generation Y, the Millennials, have been discussed and dissected for most of the last 10 years and continue to be probed and closely scrutinized under the microscope of marketing research.

I listen to a lot of sales calls. Recordings of client sellers in calls/meetings. Sometimes webcasts where someone is talking about call strategies and going through role plays. This week, it was on creating urgency with questions. So much of it begins to look like a game of pint pong.

The ability to imagine the future is something only the human species possesses, and it can be leveraged to help us feel more confident about our actions and be prepared for tomorrow. For centuries crystal balls have been objects connected with clairvoyance, fortune-telling and predicting the future. Looking into the crystal ball, or the process of “seeing” into it, is known as scrying –

The squeaky wheels in your organization may also be important sources of innovation. Some of the links between creativity and risk are pretty self-evident. Creativity is all about trying something new, exploring the unknown, and accepting uncertainty and the possibility of failure. In the corporate setting, we understand intuitively that creativity fuels strategy, innovation, and growth. In a world where machines are taking over predictable, tedious tasks,

Sales managers and reps face immense pressure to deliver results—understanding how to operate within your Overton window could be the key to career survival. I am not typically drawn to political discussions. In my experience, politics can often lead to negativity and unnecessary stress. The last time I watched political news shows, it was during the Clinton administration. Instead of television news, I prefer reading The Economist or other well-regarded publications that focus on insights rather than divisive opinions. I have a theory that we often get the leaders we need at a particular time rather than the ones we necessarily want.