Kierkegaard on Sparks and Momentum

“A road well begun is the battle half won. The important thing is to make a beginning and get under way.”

–Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Danish philosopher and writer

Top 3 activities that can hobble a salesday…

  1. Talking with people who can’t move the sales process along
  2. Unnecessary research activitiesWhat’s too much? There’s really no definitive answer. It’s particular to your sales world. Many people start to get a gut feel for when they should move on. The key is to act on it and make the call (rather than making sure every little thing is known before the call – fine line, of course). You might be surprised what you can learn by asking a straightforward question of the person who answers the phone or responds to an email.
  3. “Crafting” or “drafting” a script, email, or letter

Needs to be done, but almost never during the money hours.

Always remember… A real sales day is made of contact with people. Avoid the hobble.

 


 
 
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你好, नमस्ते and bonjour to better mobile web Gmail

There are many ways to get your Gmail on your phone. The mobile webapp version of Gmail (which you can get to by going to gmail.com in your browser) is the best way to get the most Gmail features on your iPhone or Android-powered device. Features such as search, stars, labels and threaded conversations all work in the mobile webapp just as they do in the desktop Gmail experience. Today, we’re bringing the latest version of our HTML5 webapp to 44 new languages.

Before today, this new version was only available for U.S. English, but we’re now expanding to Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and American), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (for both Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (for both Spain and South America), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu and Vietnamese.

If your phone’s default language is one of those listed, go to gmail.com in your phone’s browser and the new interface will appear in your language automatically. We’ve been rolling these changes out, so some of you may have already seen them. You’ll get a bunch of new goodies including offline support, smart links (titles will appear in links for Google Maps, YouTube and Google Docs), the ability to add and remove labels, layout improvements and more—in addition to the existing features like starring, better threaded conversations and search.

This new version works for iPhones running iOS 2.2.1 and above, and all versions of Android. Go to gmail.com in the browser of your iPhone or Android-powered device to try it out, and if you have any feedback, let us know in our forum.

Kierkegaard on Being Courageous

“The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.”

–Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Danish philosopher and writer

Email this quote

Sales challenge…

What if you checked email only 3 times a day?

For just over a week, we’ve been doing this as a team at JustSell to see if it helps us.

The rules…

Check and handle email upon arrival then check and handle email at lunch. Check and handle email after 4 pm. At home, check it all you’d like (but hopefully that won’t be more than once a day).

Here’s what we’ve learned so far…

  • We recognized our addiction to checking email.
  • We identified how it’s become a default task (automatically checking it when returning from a discussion, meeting, trip to the bathroom, etc.).
  • We saw how we sometimes use it to hide out from our more important work (“If I’m addressing email, I’m doing something. It may not be important in the long term but at least I’m of use at this moment.” – Do you see the problem with this thinking?).
  • We learned that our email could wait* and that as the day came to an end, we were more productive and happier. (Although the first few days were very uncomfortable and had us oddly distracted by our lack of distraction.)

It’s cwazy**…

Why is it that we would allow ourselves to be distracted from what we rationally know to be our more important work that gets us closer to our goal of making good things happen?

Our next step here… Drop the morning check and look at it only twice a day. A few people have already passed out by thinking about it.

(how to check email 3 times a day)

“The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)
American civil rights leader
Nobel Peace Prize recipient

* Our customer service people check email hourly in order to be sure we’re addressing customer needs quickly. We don’t believe we’ve lost any sales and we’ve had no negative feedback on our response times.

** And if we still have your attention… This spelling of the word indicates a deeper level of crazy – so cwazy that we’d spell it cwazy. You think that’s crazy?