Before I offend anyone who’s built their business around the art of cold calling, I will say that cold calling is a valuable part of selling and should never be overlooked.

One of the advantages of being in the business for a number of years is learning from your mistakes. Hopefully, this self-evaluation of a contractor will help encourage others of you to not make the same mistake repeatedly as I seem to have done.

E-mail has turned into the digital telemarketer during dinner. It’s too much, too often, and - in my lowly estimation - too cheap. I wish they’d charge for it so the spammers, slammers, and scammers could just go bother someone else.

From my office window, I see sweating people. They are not engaged in manual labor, nor using a Thigh Master; they are in fact, just standing there. I’m no meteorologist, but in Alabama, this signals summer.

My fearless editor, Mike Murphy, who shall remain nameless, wrote an editorial about the tax credit stimulus package for energy savings. He felt that the ARRA program was fairly difficult to obtain compliance for the credits.

Twitter and other social media sites are indeed the rage. Facebook, with a mere 200 million users, is hardly a kiddies’ playground anymore. LinkedIn is “the” social hangout for commercial connections. With myriad other discussion groups, subgroups, and topical hotspots for micro-niching, how’s a marketer to make it anymore?

What events are you planning to attend for the rest of 2009? What would make you want to attend a training event? What would make you stay home?

I just returned from a marketing seminar for a multistate distributor. Their message was “Change what you’re doing to change the results you’re getting,” which resonated.

It seemed like a good idea to get new tools. I mean, it was Saturday, there were a ton of specials going on. Earlier that day, I’d taken one of my old cars to my favorite shop for a little transaxle leak

For the fifth year in a row, "Fast Food" categories scored the worst among U.S. companies for customer service. Definitions from compilers varied from "rude and indifferent" to "inaccurate, unthankful."

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