I get a ton of emails from people seeking insight or asking me to solve sales dilemmas. Here are a couple that may relate to your job, your life and, most important, your sales thought process right now.

Jeffrey,

I think selling is the best job in the world, but there’s one aspect I struggle with – the feeling of being out of control. I tend to work on more complex deals that have large decision-making groups, and therefore can be quite a long cycle. I used to sell smaller deals where I could track progress more meaningfully, but now I find myself doing one $1 million deal rather than 10 $100,000 deals where the risk was spread. Any tips on how to stay sane while waiting for big decisions?

Paul,

Managing your time is not the answer. Prioritizing your accounts in the order that they are likely to close is a better way to view the process. But there are several elements involved, and several decisions you have to make:

1. Why would you give up your bread and butter and just shoot for the moon? Instead, allocate half your time to sure money and half your time to the big prize. This will leave you in control of your short-term destiny, and allow you to mark a clearer path toward the bigger deal.

2. All committees have a daddy. The person who leads the committee and the person whom he or she reports to are the two people that you should be establishing relationships with because they control the outcome.

3. Direct contact is not an option. Stop emailing people and waiting for replies. Phone numbers, cellphone numbers, early morning coffee, late afternoon casual conversations, gathering personal data and sending important business information will help establish you as a resource, rather than being looked at as a vendor.

Jeffrey,

My name is John and I am a house-call veterinarian in Syracuse, N.Y. I have been in business for just over four years. Things are steady and stable, but we are not growing the way I know we could and should be. I have tried practically EVERY type of advertising with no great outcome. We have run out of great ideas to try that won’t cost a ton of money. Please help!

John,

Before you let your business go to the dogs, you might want to try less advertising and more promotion. Begin with your Facebook business page. Post stories and videos of your existing customers and their experiences with you. Tag the customers and tag the photos. Your customers will begin to send those stories to all of their friends. Also start a YouTube channel. Make sure all the videos are posted there as well – with all the appropriate tags.

The second thing you have to do is contact all your existing customers and talk to them about why they use you. Capture all of those reasons and begin to use them in all of your messaging and promotions.

Third, start a weekly email magazine that features one of your customers every week. Fourth, subscribe to Ace of Sales and use the email program to send customers a photo of their pet with a thank-you note.

With all the promotion that you do, you will begin to have positive word-of-mouth messages and positive Internet messages sent out about you and ultimately sent back to you.