Author: Steve Ainslie

I’m a big fan of keeping things simple by following a proven routine for getting things done that happen regularly.   I eat the same thing for breakfast and for lunch nearly every day. I follow a consistent exercise routine. I have a handful of favorite T-shirts and shorts that I wear all the time. I like…

When I was about 8 years old, we used to play “Blind Man’s Bluff” in my house. This is “It” tag, with the person who is “It” wearing a blindfold. This was an extremely fun game to play indoors. Especially for me, who was nicknamed Steven “Turtle” Ainslie by my older sister because I ran too…

Back in 2015, our two cats died of natural causes within a few months of each other. We had rescued them 13  years earlier from the swamps in South Florida. They’d been with us through 7 relocations, 8 jobs, 3 dogs, 6 surgeries (theirs and ours) and a bunch of adventures.

As sales managers, we are frequently the first point of escalation for a customer satisfaction issue, a complaint about sales, and many other “customer problems.”  Without a good system for managing these, we can get caught up in the frenzy and say things we really don’t mean. 

Back in high school, my gym teacher would have us run outside every Wednesday – no matter what the weather was like.  One morning in late December, we were out running and it was snowing like crazy. We must have had 4 inches fall in less than an hour. For some reason,  my gym teacher…

A long time ago in a land far away, I was a Sales Rep for a company that was transitioning from offering traditional break/fix computer services to offering 24×7 monitoring and support (aka managed services) for a flat monthly fee.   Although our managed services practice was in a pre-launch phase, I made it my personal…

I cut my hair off the other day after growing it out for last year and a half. My long, wild hair brought back memories of my highschool years, hanging out and cruising around with friends in my mom’s Chevette*. In my imagination, I looked like Brad Pitt in Troy**.

As someone who grew up relatively poor, I don’t enjoy spending money and tend to be quite frugal. (Or, as my wife Ellen sometimes says, usually when I am wearing my favorite T-shirt, “Sometimes you are cheap to the point of being an embarrassment. You’re not going out with me looking like that. Go put on…

Some things are better done in person (for my readers with dirty minds, I’m talking about sales & management, not what you’re thinking). Today I’m going to talk about using 2 simple techniques to radically improve your results from face-to-face sales meetings. These will work in nearly every sales situation.

My Mission: Build an Enterprise SAAS sales team and deliver $25M within the next 12 months. (No pressure.) I began by selecting one of my current SMB Inside Sales Managers to the lead the team, Joe Volosky. Like everyone else on my team except me,  Joe had no experience selling to Enterprise IT. But he was up for the…