Clearly you did not rise to your exalted position through sales,” she said after a moment, only the faintest catch in her dry voice. “Because your pitch could use some work.

We may convince others by our arguments; but we can only persuade them by their own

In contrast to your usual minions, I imagine, I’m a bit more awed by your conceit and arrogance than I am by your supposed magnificence.

We get sales leads from many different directions, and we needed a system that could manage those automatically in order to effectively pursue our leads. Before that, our follow-up was not as efficient as we wanted, so this was essential.

First, we have to try and determine how many flowers to order by reviewing the previous year's sales, and figuring in outside factors. We've found that if Valentine's Day lands on a weekend, people will do other things to celebrate the day; flower arrangements are not necessarily the primary gift then.

Expecting job growth on the order of about 150,000 in December, financial markets were taken aback, to say the least, when those figures came in at only a thousand new jobs.