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salespodder

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TMI Over-rides Helpfulness

I was in an informal first-meet the other day. It lasted around half-an-hour in a coffee shop that offered that wonderful Zumex-enabled fresh orange juice I’m so fond of. The chap the ‘other side’ of the table was interested in one specific project, for which we had a neat

Reference Visit & Corporate Hospitality

I was judging presentations as part of a sales training exercise for a client when the first team up ended with a close routine suggesting the prospect be flown around the world to visit as a reference an undeniably aspirational location. The three following teams picked up on this and

Malcolm Gladwell - Blink

A main conclusion of this book should spark any solution seller into action: First impressions (and its sibling “rapid cognition”) are so powerful and so open to subconscious prejudice, that you must do all you can to control them in your favour. Apparently many of us are expert in a

Champion Losing It

Serena Williams is still on top of her game, yet looked down and out in her Aussie Open Quarter when four-love adrift to Victoria Azarenka in the second set, having also lost the opener. But somehow she turned it around to triumph 4-6, 7-6 (7/4), 6-2. As she walked

Standing Out For Good

A BBC News Hard Talk interview with Graham Poll turned up an interesting gem. He’s a former football ref who officiated at two World Cups. The questioner asked whether he shared the lay-man’s commonly held belief that a good referee is an invisible one. Poll replied that this

Mapping The Process

Whenever you first move into the seemingly murky world of solution selling, someone usually takes you to one side and suggests that the fog of war can be lifted by “mapping the process”. With specific regard to sign-off procedures, I had a reminder of this when recently helping out on

If A Baboon Can Do It...

I recently spent a couple of hours in the wonderful company of a baboon troop, one of eleven around South Africa’s Cape Point Peninsula. I was fascinated not only by our cousin’s behaviour, but just as much by the story surrounding the fight to protect them. It seems

Sales Secretary Re-Emergence?

I had a meeting with a chap called Francois tasked with setting up a new division for a firm that, in his words, provide software and services around ‘incident and warranty management’. This past decade they grew, mainly by acquisition, from 70 to 700 people. They’ve recently rolled out

Bank Manager's Top 2 Business Plan Failings

Will the lengthy and deep downturn trigger a long period of almost static economic performance or worse still, become a double-dip recession? This is a question taxing the financial press, yet many of the people I speak to, working in the field day-in, day-out, seem more optimistic. One such chirpy

What Happens Next

An exchange I was privy to the other day reminded me of how often I’ve cringed when hearing a sales manager talk to one of their charges about a deal. How is it that so often senior people forget how they themselves wanted to be treated when they were