My wonderfully hard-working vendor rep at Avaya, Danielle Mellado, sent me this gem as part of her .SIG.  It actually caught me hard enough I stopped and re-read it a couple of times while thinking about it.  At that point, I felt it was well worth sharing:

When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want?
.. Will you hug that college degree in the walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to the garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in rereading your financial statement? Of course not. What will matter then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn’t they matter most now?  — Max Lucado

This pretty much ties in with another line of reasoning I’ve been following lately in both business and my personal life.  To paraphrase Jeffrey Gitomer, don’t try and sell anyone anything.  Just make friends with them.  Focus on your relationship with them.  “Sales” — what ever that might mean to you — will follow as a natural extension.

Recent good news for me with both my personal life and JKL5 is starting to bear this out.  In one case, a customer I hadn’t talked to in over two years looked me up to help them out with a problem — I hadn’t sold anything to them to this point.  I just built the relationship with them, established myself as someone they could work with and even though the original project didn’t pan out, they came looking for me when the time was right.

Combining “do unto others” with “patience is” seems to be a powerful long-term tonic.  Who would have thought that such valuable wisdom would prove valuable?