Advice For Winning Golf From Danny Balin

Want to play like a winner? You'd be hard pressed to find someone better to emulate than Danny Balin, assistant pro at Burning Tree Country Club in Greenwich, and winner of the 2011 Lincoln Met PGA Championship. Balin was one of several panelists at this spring's Met PGA Best Practices Forum who had excellent advice for those of us who want to score better in tournament play--or anytime.

"During your practice rounds, spend 80% of your time on chipping and putting and 20% on everything else," Balin recommends. When it comes to putting, he suggest using a chalk line to help train your eyes and a tee gate made just wide enough for your putter to fit through to groove your stroke. He also only practices straight putts since playing a break starts by rolling the ball straight on the proper line. Finally, he reminds us to train our eyes to see the ball go into the hole. "Do your eyes focus on one target, or flit around?" he asks.

When it comes to course management, Balin says, "Par is a great score." He believes a big part of the mental game is understanding that fact and knowing when (and when NOT) to go pin hunting, be too aggressive, be too conservative. To help your mental game, Balin recommends reading books--not just about golf--dealing with training athletes' minds. One he favors is Mind Gym by Gary Mack.

Among many other books, Dave Donelson is the author of Weird Golf: 18 tales of fantastic, horrific, scientifically impossible, and morally reprehensible golf

HR Pros Offer Advice At 914Inc Power Breakfast

I'll be moderating a panel of Human Resource professionals next week, addressing issues from how you should (and can) control your employee's social media usage to what will happen if the Supreme Court overturns the healthcare legislation--and what if it doesn't? The event is a 914Inc. Magazine's Power Breakfast to be held Tuesday, April 24, at 7:30 AM at the Doubletree Hotel in Tarrytown, NY.

Joining me on the panel are five experts who bring different viewpoints on these and other issues:

Susan Corcoran
Jackson Lewis (a labor and employment law firm)
White Plains

Greg Chartier
Principal, The Office of Gregory J Chartier
Chair of the Human Resources Council of the Westchester Business Council

Ann Henning
Human Resources Manager, Sprint

Edwin L. Bowman
Principal, BowmanBecker Consultancy, LLC
Past President, Westchester Human Resources Management Association

Joseph DiCarlo
Director of HR, WESTMED
Former VP of HR, Porter Novelli

Tickets are complementary, but seats are limited, so make your reservations today.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Weird Golf Debuts On The Links

The first edition of my new golf anthology, WEIRD GOLF, is now available in all formats.

The subtitle tells it all: 18 tales of fantastic, horrific, scientifically impossible, and morally reprehensible golf.

It's available for Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other ebook readers and a trade paperback edition was released Friday.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Negotiating With Honor

How do you negotiate honorably and successfully? By negotiating both value and price with the goal of striking the most favorable deal for both the buyer and the seller. If there is a morality problem with a negotiated sale, it’s when one party’s aim is to “win” the game at the expense of the other. If both the buyer and the seller can believe in and practice win/win negotiations, everybody’s life is easier and they can sleep better at night.

Unfortunately, too many people engage in win/lose negotiation. They believe that the only way they can gain value is by taking it away from the other person. They view every transaction as a zero-sum game. This belief is anathema to the Creative Selling System. You can’t build long term customer relationships based on taking advantage of the customer every time you sell them something. Sooner or later they’ll figure it out.

When you engage in win/lose negotiation, you create an adversarial relationship with your prospect. That lifeblood of Creative Selling, information about the prospect’s needs, is cut off at the source because the prospect soon realizes that you’re using that information to gain the upper hand in the negotiations.

That’s one of the main reasons, by the way, that the traditional consultive selling approach is so ineffective—many prospects fear that giving information to the consultive seller will just give him ammunition to use in future negotiations. So they clam up or even give misleading information to confuse the seller.

You can’t create solutions to the prospect’s needs unless you learn what those needs are. Without that information, your selling effort degenerates into a guessing game where you have to keep offering different proposals without having the feedback necessary to come up with good ones. And because your ideas don’t very accurately meet the prospect’s needs, fewer sales occur. The win/lose negotiation attitude may produce a larger single order today, but it reduces the probability of getting better orders tomorrow.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.