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How To Be A Rainmaker 2000 Jeffrey Fox

[https://salespodder.com/content/images/wordpress/2014/09/rainmaker-fox-cover.jpg] I first read this book, over a decade ago. I spoke with publisher Random House about penning something on Selling. In time honoured fashion I asked them what they wanted. “Like our current author Jeffrey Fox, but funnier”. Their view

Where Your Latest Pitch Can Build On Teenager App Prize-Winners

So in the UK there’s a new competition for teenage app developers. If you can get by the presence of its wholly inappropriate figurehead, it seems a worthwhile endeavour. Not least because of the £15,000 prize for further idea development. A trio of apps just won this funding.

Apply Big History To Your Next Big Proposal

All the best Proposals and initial bid presentations have a section that can be loosely termed ‘how we got here’. It cannot be doubted that any such formality benefits hugely from the prospect realising that you really do understand their business. Better still with an almost forensic precision. One delivered

Have You Thought Of Allowing A 'Maybe'?

[https://salespodder.com/content/images/wordpress/2013/08/yes-no-maybe-fitting-room-hangers.jpg] I’m a salesman. I hate fence-sitters. Loathe the undecideds. Maybes are for the weak. Or are they? This is what greeted me when I popped in a changing room to try on a few collared t-shirts recently. Being as

Star Pitch

Late 2011, early 2012 I helped one solution sales team refine their pitch. The boss told me that client storytelling in front of prospects was thin on the ground. I asked each in turn to regale me. Wax lyrical about their favourite tale of customer success. Deliver a snappy story

Where’s Your Index Customer?

The current ebola outbreak sees infections for the first time appear beyond Africa. I wondered why the travelling Liberian struck down by the virus in Dallas was referred to as America’s Index Patient. The only such epidemiological phrase I was familiar with at the time was Patient Zero. Unburdened

What's Your DNA In One Word?

I noted recently a 2013 NYTimes Corner Office [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/business/salesforcecom-executive-on-seeking-out-challenges.html] piece which touched on interviewing. From the bowels of crm vendor Salesforce, the advice of their top Ops guy was to know yourself well. The question he favours to uncover this is;

You Get What You Pay For

[https://salespodder.com/content/images/wordpress/2014/09/buyonpxpayx2-line-400x34.jpg] If, like me, you tend to be involved in markets where you are never the cheapest (not even close to it in most cases myself) then you’ll have had that comedy moment. The one where you tell your prospect

Know The Syntax Own The Bid

[http://www.fastcompany.com/] This is part of an Instagram posting by Fast Company [http://www.fastcompany.com/]recently. Its caption read, “postit exercise we did as staff to describe Fast Company’s mission”. I warmly applaud the concept. Sticky labels across the window is a winner. The words though,

Building Team Spirit In Your Bubble

As a cricket nut, I couldn’t resist a post on the extraordinary week that surrounds Kevin Pietersen’s autobiographical score-settling. Being in Team England famously became known as life in the bubble during the past decade. A bubble, it seems, beset by the danger of several pricks. Any of