Author: Steve Ainslie

I hate business travel and the complications that come with it: inevitable flight delays & cancellations, noisy hotel rooms promising sleepless nights, bad food at high prices and anything that has to do with flying.  Even when I’m out of town for just one night I miss my wife, my pets, my bed, my house and even…

As the manager of your sales team, you might have more sales expertise, business savvy and (maybe) even more street smarts than any of the reps on your team. If you are an experienced manager, this might be true. (Even worse – if you are an inexperienced manager, you probably think this is true.) One trap…

When I took Snickers on her morning walk today, we ran into someone I’d never met before walking his dog down the street.  After our dogs finished sniffing each others butts, the man surprised me (no, he did not sniff my butt). He said,  I’m Dave. I used to live in your house.

I’m not a recruiter, but because I stay in touch with good headhunters and All Stars within my network, they often contact me when they are hiring sales managers, directors and VPs. If I know someone who might be a good match, I’ll connect him to the headhunter and let the two of them take…

On my 2nd day of work as “Technical Sales Guy” at the advertising agency, my boss and I arrived at our client’s office and were escorted into a huge boardroom full of VP’s who had flown in from all over the country for this meeting. When all 30 people turned to stare at us, I wanted to…

A few years ago I was working a trade show in New Orleans and decided to visit the casino since I’d never been in one before.  I know how to play Blackjack so I stepped up to play at a $5 per hand table. Within 30 seconds I had lost $20. (Apparently I am not like everybody…

In high school, I set a personal goal to graduate as Valedictorian. Our class ranking was based on GPA. I set my sights on attaining a perfect 4.0 GPA.   But alas, I was not very athletic nor artistic. In my first 2 years, I earned a couple of B’s in Gym and Art. I graduated as Valedictorian…

2 years ago, I signed up for an online training program from GMB Fitness. At the time, I had no plans to change my high-intensity crossfit training routine. I just wanted to learn how to do handstand pushups and to move a bit more fluidly. When I signed up for the course, GMB surprised me by…

Before I launched Inside Sales Dude almost a year ago, I was contacted by a CEO who wanted to hire me as his VP of Sales.  We had an in-depth discussion about his business, his need for a structured sales organization and his revenue projections. Although we had an interesting discussion, at the end of…