Good morning!
Both personally and professionally, 2024 was a wonderfully challenging year. Allison and I are both looking forward to 2025, but before I turn the page, here is a quick list of:
My 2024 Favorites
- Top favorite client email received (from a new rep): “Hey, Bill. I just made my first sale!” What a great feeling. I am truly honored he thought of letting me know.
- Top favorite business podcast: Acquired. Origin stories of the world’s best-known companies. Fascinating!
- Top favorite grandson quote: “I need my help.” It took me days to make sense of it, but then I finally realized 3 year old Mason was always being asked, “Mason, do you need my help?” whenever he was stuck. So, it is no wonder he one day he parroted back, “I need my help!”
- Top happy/sad moment: Printing Impressions’ Editor Mark Michelson’s retirement. This guy is classy and full of old school integrity. Let the legend of Ashley Roberts begin!
- Top snow globe-shaking event: My daughter Emma joining The Sales Vault and pushing us into the world of AI. It’s been equal parts overwhelming, challenging, frustrating, enlightening, enticing, and recharging. And we haven’t even launched the good stuff!
- Top favorite business trip: Lemay Sanchez’ PlanProphet Champion Summit. So much interaction and sharing. Highly recommend. Possibly our most successful conference ever (oh, and it was in Miami in January, which didn’t suck). Went from there to Key West.
- Top least favorite business trip: 24 hours in New Orleans. Caught some kind of bug. Lying in bed, sweating and shivering, wondering how I can possibly give two presentations in this condition. But the show must go on, so…
- Top most humbling moment: Being surprised at the NPSOA conference in March. My wife conspired with the event organizers to take a running joke to the next level and create the Friends of the Farquharson Family award (F-OFF, for short).
- Top mind-blowing moment: Entering my company’s URL into Google NotebookLM and seeing it kick back a 16-minute podcast that described The Sales Vault better than I can!
In March of 2025, my mom would have turned 100 years old. She frequently told me, “Billy, you lead an interesting life.” Can’t tell you how frequently I think of that statement. I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to share some thoughts on sales with clients who become friends. Thank you for everything you do for me. Starting next week there will be two Farquharsons talking at you as I share the stage with my AI-expert daughter, Emma. She and I will be a yin-and-yang team, releasing a blog of thoughts every Tuesday and co-presenting several events. Got to keep it new, informative, and, you know, interesting.
Happy New Year, everyone!
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This Friday, January 3, join Bill and Emma as they bring AI to your prospecting efforts in a special 2-hour webinar called, “Sales and AI: Back to the Future.” Register here.
