No matter what side you were on, here are a few observations, affirmations and truths, post-election, with respect to selling:

1. Strategy and tactics are equally important. The purpose of executing tactics in a sales campaign is to drive a well-founded strategy. Tactics without a strategy is like playing darts with your eyes closed.
2. Message! Not messages, messages, messages. Decide what you are going to count on to win based upon research - a focused, objective assessment of the sales opportunity.
3. You can successfully change the ground rules even if you temporarily lose ground.
4. The understanding and leverage of political influence is crucial.
5. Messages must be clear, concise and compelling and paint the vision of a better situation for the buyer. One fumbled message can dilute the impact of a hundred perfect ones.
6. Logic and the facts aren’t the only things buyers consider.
7. Discipline rules. Seat-of-the-pants doesn’t.
8. Knowledge of your opponent’s plan to win is vital for devising and refining your own plan.
9. Direct and blatant “bad-mouthing-the-competition” doesn’t generally work.
10. Never underestimate the underdog.
11. Want to win? Look the part.
12. Tell the truth before your opponent exaggerates it.
13. Choose the right team. The salesperson is CEO of their own virtual sales corporation. Whom they choose to stand next to them and to advise them can make a big difference.
14. Whomever has momentum at the time of close generally wins. Its very difficult to build momentum just at the right time without a plan.
15. Embrace technology. It permeates pretty much everything most of us do.
16. Go broad and deep into the customer’s organization as appropriate. (Ideally effective marketing will have blazed the trail in advance.

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The media needs to report the facts, regardless how grim, about the economic troubles. But, the messages of doom-and-gloom tend to become self fulfilling prophecies. The trouble is that in order to get our economy back on track, ultimately what we need to address is a confidence issue and one is going to spend or lend if they are continually being terrorized by the media.

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“In a hurricane even a turkey can fly.”
Author Unknown

Not since l990 have we seen a downturn in the economy as we have in recent months.  The vision of a turnaround has been pushed out until at least next year and most indicators point to the bottom of our double-dip and mild improvements will begin.  We won’t begin to “feel better” until possibly the third or fourth quarter of next year.  While the downturn – okay recession – was tough in the early ‘90’s you have to go back to the early ‘80’s to see one that had the global scale as the one we’re experiencing today. 
The warning signs were there:

• sales were steadily declining
• prices were plummeting
• consumers (business and individuals) said they couldn’t afford products or services
• buyers became more cautious and searched for better values
• reports of layoffs, increased bankruptcies, wholesale corporate reorganization fill the business pages and business press
• the global loss in faith in financial institutions only added fuel to the fire

It is easy to blame the global financial position on the greed of management.  It is just as easy to lay the fault at Congress’ front door because of their self-paralysis.

              
Marginal Growth
The U.S. economy grew slightly more than a paltry one percent during the first two quarters.  Car/truck sales even with zero and creative financing are finding few buyers. Bigger, more powerful PCs sit on store shelves despite fire sale prices.

While market sectors may be off there are pockets of light.  For example:

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In America, the small business owner has been used to sitting on the sidelines and watching whilst the large corporations dominate all areas of industry. Many small business owners have gone out of business whilst others often struggle to survive. One of the reasons behind this was that the Bush administration tended to offer very little support, instead making tax cuts for the corporate world. With the election campaigns now in full swing, Barack Obama has pledged to help small businesses survive and enable to thrive in the coming years.

Obama has put a number of measures in his manifesto that could help small businesses to take root and grow in the world of business because he fully recognizes that they are the heart of the American economy. Small businesses provide valuable jobs and income to millions of Americans up and down the country and, were they to go out of business, could actually make the economic situation worse. In fact, in some quarters, financial experts are touting the possibility of a recession on the scale of the 1929 Depression. By keeping small businesses alive and healthy, it can strengthen the economy and give Americans everywhere a little security of peace of mind.

Tax Issues

Obama has pledged to help small businesses by putting a series of measures that may help them into place. For example, he has pledged to reduce the burden on the owners of small businesses that may struggle to make ends meet by providing them with a little tax relief. Every small business owner has to pay both employee and business owner taxes, but with the $500 tax credit per worker that Barack Obama is proposing the burden of those payments will lift somewhat. This in turn leaves a little in the coffers to fun expenses like health care, gas prices and energy bills, all of which have risen in the past few years.

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Who’s to blame for the current financial markets crisis? The simple answer is everybody!

When Mortgage Brokers and Bankers are pushing home loans like too much candy at the county fair, what can we expect but an upset stomach the next day? Worse, we see the sickness but continue in order to feed the gods of profit. So they are blame. So everybody blames the greedy bankers. And that’s true; however they’re not alone in this blame game.

For too long the average person has bought into the fallacy that, above all, he must own his own home. It’s become part of our collective psyche. We as individuals have to take responsibility for our decisions and actions. When we take out a mortgage that eats 70% of our income each month, the outcome is foretold. We cannot claim fiscal illiteracy.

The middlemen buying the mortgages and bundling them up for investments are out to make a profit above all, forget about risk, forget commonsense and forget about their responsibility to their clients all in the name of profit above all else. They’re to blame for not tempering their risk appetite with a healthy dose of prudence.

The investors are equally at fault for not understanding what they’re investing in. Here too we cannot claim fiscal illiteracy. A 3rd grader wouldn’t be reading “War & Peace”, nor would I, a confessed banker, understand an advanced book on quantum physics. So why are people diving into complicated investment schemes without truly understanding them or the associated risks?

The government is to blame for over-regulation in some areas and under-regulation in others. Pushing banks to issue home loans to the masses because that’s what looks good in the polls. Even going as far as creating huge institutions to guarantee home loans, allowing the “people” above all to own their own home.

It’s no wonder financial liquidity is drying up in the market.

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The biggest questions on the minds of Americans today are, What is going to happen to our economy?” “Will we have a depression?” “How can I survive?”

It has been my opinion for the past 10 years that we are long overdue for a full scale economic depression. But, it will be completely different from the depression predicted by my contemporaries.

We have already seen a stock market crash in 1987 bigger than the one that preceded the depression of the 1930s. - And, we have already had more bank and S&L failures (percentage wise) than back then, too.

The rate of bankruptcies has grown from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands each year - now, over a million bankruptcies each year - with the biggest percentage of bankruptcies in the higher income brackets.

Employee lay-offs, plant closings, and business failures have increased exponentially over the past 5 years. And, for the first time in our history, the unemployment rate among white-collar executives is higher (percentage wise) than among blue-collar workers.

All of these facts lead me to sincerely believe that …

The Depression of the 1930s was a “Blue Collar” Depression
But …
The Next Depression will be a “White Collar” Depression

Simply because …

Our Economy Has Become Top Heavy

There are simply too many white-collar workers, bureaucrats, and unnecessary people doing unnecessary paper-shuffling busy work. They consume far more than they are capable of producing. - These are the people who will be out of work, on the bread lines, during the next depression … NOT the blue-collar workers.

As an illustration: Before I had money enough to pay someone to sweep the floors, I did it myself (still do; on occasion).

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John McCain, the Republican candidate for the 2008 Presidential Election, is a man on a mission. He has extremely strong views about all sorts of areas of American life, and the economy is no different. However, unlike his opponent in the election Barack Obama, very few people have any idea what measures he will put in place to boost the business economy, and the American economy in general, should he be elected in November. The business economy is an extremely important area of policy for whoever the next President is to be because recovery from the impact of the credit crunch and Bush’s economic policy is going to be extremely difficult.

McCain’s Business Economy History

McCain’s business economy history is a little ambivalent to say the very least. This is because he freely admits that his economic knowledge is not as good as it could be, and should be considering his election campaign is not in full swing. This has the potential to leave him open to the influence of his cabinet, which has the potential to take care of the corporate world over the small business owners that are already struggling.

However, McCain does seem to have very strong views on the subject, even if they do change over time. McCain initially fought to prevent President Bush’s tax cuts but has now proposed to cement them, thus cutting corporate taxes from 35% to 25%. This may be a direct result of the fact that a number of corporations have supported him throughout his campaign.

Economic Stance

What McCain lacks in business economy knowledge, he makes up for in conviction. He describes himself as a free-enterprise capitalist and appears to be committed to reviving the business economy for the good of the country.

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Business appeared to be booming for the top companies in all sectors during 2007 if the list of mergers and acquisitions is to be believed. The number of companies bought and sold was certainly impressive, with 42 FORTUNE 1,000 corporations exchanging hands. This number of corporation buyouts had not been reached since the year 2000.

2007 was a huge year for mergers and acquisitions around the world. In the US alone, it was the single biggest year since the turn of the millennium, suggesting that many corporations actually faced tougher competition from their rivals than they were able to cope with or, alternatively and much more likely, that they faced financial difficulties as consumer spending begin to falter in line with the American economy and the credit crunch took hold. These factors probably lowered the selling price of the individual corporations that were the subjects of mergers and acquisitions but would have also made them vulnerable to corporate takeovers by larger and more dominant companies within the individual industries.

The majority of mergers took place in the sector of finance, healthcare, technology and energy, with the latter two attracting higher average selling prices for individual businesses. Mergers and acquisitions also took place in the utilities, capital goods, consumer staples, basic materials and consumer cyclicals sectors but the levels of the final buyout prices were nowhere near the level of those in the former sectors. However, in terms of the number of mergers and acquisitions, it was the consumer cyclicals sector that saw the majority of the action!

The top 10 mergers and acquisitions are listed below for ease of reference. Out of the ten, there were only two acquired by private equity buyers. The rest were the acquisition of corporate takeovers. They are listed in order, from the highest to lowest:

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