Dear Bob ...I am so impressed with the article on intuition ("Intuition's role," Keep the Joint Running, April 3, 2006). I rely a lot on my intuition and it has certainly guided me making all the right decisions. In fact I find rationalizing everything a painful exercise because you need only one emotion to wipe it out! A friend of mine recently pointed out that the word intuition stands for in- tuition meaning Dear Bob …I am so impressed with the article on intuition (“Intuition’s role,” Keep the Joint Running, April 3, 2006). I rely a lot on my intuition and it has certainly guided me making all the right decisions. In fact I find rationalizing everything a painful exercise because you need only one emotion to wipe it out! A friend of mine recently pointed out that the word intuition stands for in- tuition meaning in- training. So when you use your intuition, you are really using what you have trained yourself in.By way of introduction, I am a Change Management Practitioner by profession and have recently moved into opening my own business which involves enhancing the softer skills. I would like some advice from you in the skills I could use to strategically position my business. I wholesale or license products to organizations & other training companies and it seems that people are very bamboozled when I explain what I do. Either I am not very articulate or there is little appetite for enhancing the soft skills.I would like your thoughts on this. Thanks.– Trying to market Dear Marketing …A few thoughts, although I’m not sure I’m the best source for this, not being all that good at sales myself.First: Even if your intuition has guided you to make “all the right decisions,” I’d encourage you to rely on it less. Intuition has two challenges as a decision-making tool. First, it often turns into arrogance, causing some people to start believing in their own infallability. And second, it’s remarkably unpersuasive (“My intuition tells me that X.” “Oh yeah? Well my intuition tells me that Not X!”) By all means use all the intuition you have. But don’t consider the next step to be rationalization. View it as proving the point to your more skeptical self. Apply this cognitive model to all of your business decisions.Second … develop a home page that displays on all browsers [note to readers – I’m willing to give advice, but can’t publicize the businesses of those seeking advice, so you’ll have to trust me on this one. – Bob]. I use FireFox with moderate security settings and yours doesn’t display. In particular, don’t use a home page that assumes plug-ins like Flash (which I’m guessing yours does). They don’t impress businesspeople all that much, but do reduce your reach – if your page doesn’t load in a few seconds, most visitors will move on.Third, and most important: Stop thinking in terms of whether businesses are or are not interested in soft skills. Skills are a means to an end. I’d advise this thought process: 1. What business benefit do you provide? It’s up to you to connect the dots between what you have to sell and how the company benefits. (For example, IT Catalysts, my consulting company, deals in IT organizational effectiveness and strategic alignment. Connecting the dots – we help companies make sure their IT investments are placed in the highest-impact efforts; we help shift IT investment from non-discretionary to new-value-enabling efforts; and we help make sure a higher percentage of projects complete successfully. That connects what we do to bottom-line benefit.)2. Who are you selling to? Define a target company profile, and the individual within that company (the position, that is) who has both the interest and authority to make the buying decision. Remember that when you’re selling, companies don’t make decisions. Individuals make them; other individuals influence them. Figure out who the players are in the abstract. For each actual prospect, do your best to figure it out name by name.3. How are you going to get his/her attention? Nobody has enough time; everyone has an over-abundance of skepticism. You have to break through both challenges, just to tell your story to a sympathetic audience. Good luck. You’re entering a crowded market, and soft skills are harder to connect to benefit than hard ones.– Bob Technology Industry