It’s been nearly three months since the Sales Insider’s last blog post.

I’ve been heavily involved with the new XANT Certified Administrator project, and various Dreamforce 2011-related projects, so other than an occasional tweet, and interacting with clients, time for our online presence has been in short supply.

However, a few weeks ago in a company meeting, we watched this presentation on TED.com. And I was absolutely compelled to write a post on its contents.

It’s 18 minutes long. The ideas presented within it are simple and easy to comprehend.

And I cannot stop thinking about it.

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Two years ago, Roger Andrus, head of the Business Development Corporation of Provo, Utah, ran a little experiment by bringing in a select group of applicants for an intensive, 12-week business mentoring program in conjunction with Griffin-Hill, a respected training organization. The results were startling. Overall, each of the companies represented in the 2010 TechX…

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The Power of Thought and attitude in salesWhen that guy on the freeway nearly ran you into the median the other day (or maybe it was this morning)—were you angry or matter-of-fact about the situation?

Were you screaming obscenities, or was it a more pragmatic, “Hmm, it’s too bad that he’s driving dangerously; I really wonder why he’d put himself at risk like that”?

When it rains does it depress, or captivate you?

When a prospect doesn’t show up to an appointment, is it because they’re an idiot, or because they’re a business professional with exceptional demands on their time, who needs and deserves your best work, your best effort to help them?

The answer is, of course, it’s a choice. Your choice . . . .

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Sales performance and Jerry Magure - "Help me help you.". Image courtesy of IMDB.com and Columbia-TriStar PicturesEvery semester for two years while teaching college composition, I used an excerpt from the movie script for Jerry Maguire to emphasize the key point of writer ethos.

Classically defined, ethos is the persona, or appearance, of a writer or orator to their audience—the words they chose, the emotional voice and tone, the sense of authority the speaker projects.

Parts of the film haven’t aged well since the mid-’90s, but there’s an essential essence that still resonates, a part of the human experience that it manages to capture. The movie at its heart wasn’t a story about sports, or even love; it was a story about a human being coming to realize the power of humility, self-actualization, and integrity.

The metaphor for the entire film becomes Jerry’s journey to Kinkos at 3:00 AM to make a hundred copies of a mission statement he had just written because he knew, KNEW that it was that damn important, and that he’d never be able to look himself in the mirror again if he didn’t do something about it.

The story rings true because we recognize something about the character in ourselves; the person who sees that the real path to success lies in everything that they aren’t.

And for some reason, even in the midst of the Digital Age Sales 2.0 world, we still haven’t gotten the message . . . .

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