Poker and sell­ing :
If you ever watch poker on tele­vi­sion, you will see both pro­fes­sion­als and ama­teurs stare at each other when a deci­sion is called for. Many times the eyes lock. The player who is star­ing is try­ing to get a read on whether the bet­ting party has a legit­i­mate win­ner. Then, the player trying […]

Poker and Sell­ing:
I just sat down at a cash game at the Hard Rock Casino in Tampa. I was catch­ing cards and the chips were stack­ing up.  I had a pair of Kings and an Ace came up on the flop. There were only three of us in the hand – every­one else had folded. […]

Bluff­ing is the most excit­ing topic in poker. It is the art of win­ning with­out hav­ing the best hand.
Wikipedia defines “a pure bluff, or stone-cold bluff, is a bet or raise with an infe­rior hand that has lit­tle or no chance of improv­ing. A player mak­ing a pure bluff believes he can win the pot only […]

Edi­tors note:  By day, Tuna is a pro­fes­sional sales per­son,  hump­ing his bag across his multi-state ter­ri­tory.  By night and week­ends he is an accom­plished  semi-professional poker player.   (Which  I guess means  he can’t com­pletely pay his mort­gage play­ing poker) What fol­lows is a the first of a series as Tuna looks at the similarities […]

I sell, there­fore I am.
OK maybe it’s not really that deep.  How­ever, if you are now and want to con­tinue to be a suc­cess­ful sales per­son there are at least  5 truths as it relates to your per­sonal development

Pro­fes­sional sales peo­ple must con­tin­u­ally learn and adapt.
Fail­ure to change may mean that we lose  the trust and […]

Whats that thing Mom used to say?  God gave you two ears and one mouth.   Active lis­ten­ing is the best great­est skill a sales per­son can carry in their bag. Unfor­tu­nately nearly all sales train­ing revolves around talk­ing, pre­sent­ing and plac­ing the buy­ing influ­ences into cat­e­gories.
Good lis­ten­ing skills is an art form that take a […]

Twenty-one days into the month and I had zero on the books. Null. Zip. Noth­ing. You get the pic­ture.
How­ever, the sit­u­a­tion was bright­ened with an appoint­ment so I got busy.
Get­ting up early, I did my pre-call research and gath­ered all my mate­ri­als.
Arriv­ing early, I greeted the par­tic­i­pants of the meet­ing with a smile and some food.
Ask­ing questions, […]

I was half way through last year (2008) and like most sales peo­ple – it was a very chal­leng­ing year. With two kids in col­lege, fail­ure was not an option. Yet, with both new accounts and sales vol­ume on the decline, my com­mis­sions were down and often miss­ing in action.
I’m in the com­puter net­work­ing business […]