About Jerry hocutt

People want to be heard. So…tell me… 

I’ll ask questions that only you can answer. 

I’ve spent decades asking questions of businesspeople and helping them to find answers to their problems. Along the way, I’ve learned something interesting: when presented with the right question, people are often surprised to discover they already knew the answer. 

Answers they knew all along without knowing they knew them. 

I’m now retired, but my career began in outside sales in Dallas in 1973. After moving to Seattle in 1979, I became the #1 salesperson in the nation for a Fortune 1000 company for three years before starting our own sales training business. 

Traveling the country for 15 years with our seminars, I worked with everyone from Fortune 500 companies to one-person businesses – and trained more than 150,000 entrepreneurs, executives, managers, salespeople, professionals, engineers, U.S. Marines, an 80-year-old Harvard professor, a prima ballerina, and an international opera singer. 

Go figure. 

I’ve also been interviewed and featured in the Los Angeles Times (“His plain-spokeness wins people over”), the Chicago Tribune, and the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

I’ve written several books including Buy You Coffee?: 150+ Sales Questions I've Asked and Been Asked Over Coffee; and The Wickedly Fun Dictionary of Business: Words That Escaped Me Before My Brain Finished Downloading. 

Cold Calling for Cowards is the name of my 15-year seminar and my best-selling book. Don’t let the title fool you. It’s about what makes people hesitate to act—and how to overcome it. It could just as easily have been called Taking the Initiative to Meet Complete Strangers for Introverts. Just not as catchy. 

It shows an instant technique for creating courage devised by a Holocaust survivor to help you face your nervousness and fear when initiating contact with strangers – in business, social settings, and networking events. The seminar and book are about beliefs, preparing for job and sales interviews, reading people, remembering names, communication – in person and by telephone – resilience, and more. 

But enough about me. 

I’ve got questions. You’ve got answers. 

So…tell me…