salespodder

salespodder

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Words To Avoid

Two valuable learning experiences I gained in the mid-90s alerted me to the over-formality of sales letter writing. The first involved a sales manager of mine commenting that I was too structured at the beginning of a letter. Saying things that didn’t need saying. As a result, I altered

Work hard for your money?

I’ve suffered the displacing emotion of buying a few things recently. For most categories of service/product I’m after, I can run a beauty parade. One such pagent led me to a young fella called ‘Kev’ on England’s south coast. I called him up first, he confirmed

Ditch Competitor Pricing Obsessions

A customer of mine’s just distributed one of their smaller, niche competitor’s price list around their sales team. The guy who obtained it got all excited and thought it’d help them beat up the young whipper-snappers more. I’ve never been able to see this. These people

Ever Seen A Baby Pigeon?

One of my friends in Cape Town hails from the mysterious luvvy infested world of advertising. A place filled with murkiness I cannot fathom, she told me of an event last week with a English speaker. He was a copy-writer from agency Young & Rubicon in London, who’d enjoyed

Proposal Presentation Approaches

I’ve recently got delegated a new role, that of Purchasing Manager 🙂 where I’m poacher turned gamekeeper and am actually out buying some stuff. All a bit new to me, it’s looking to get some creative and technical work done. What’s interesting is that I’ve had

Natalie's Winning Direction

Went along to a swish sports awards bash last night in Cape Town, where the guest speaker wasNatalie Du Toit [http://www.nataliedutoit.com/]. Now (somehow) I’d not heard of her before, and it turns out she’s a total hero. A potential Olympian swimmer already aged 16ish, a

Web-Enabled Laziness

You ask any CEO, and they’ll tell you the vast majority of reps are lazy. There are all sorts of historical reasons for this. I, for my part, know that most reps are indeed lazy. They tend by their very nature to seek out short-cuts, follow the quickest paths

Why the 'Dear John'?

Forced to talk today about a bizarre, yet surprisingly frequent, sales knock-back which I was just involved with. A meeting with two fellas from a prospect ended in high spirits, both saying they liked what we do and would talk it over with a trio of their senior management colleagues

Retail idiots in Cape Town

So there I was in Cape Town and my local mobile number from the MTN network decided not to work. Having been in this position before, I went into one of their kiosks and asked for it to be re-activated. Unlike on the previous occasion, I was given flannel about

Benioff Talks Futures

Salesforce.com have hauled their ‘roadshows’ around England featuring an “inspirational keynote” (their words) speech by their founder. In the mid-90s, I witnessed a similar event, with a multimedia presentation from Tom Siebel at a Chicago crm show, so I was expecting an experience a bit like reading a how-to