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salespodder

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A Few Good (Sales) Men

Quite a few courtroom based movies have lessons for sales people. The way lawyers ask questions is always fertile ground for learning. In this case, the movie sees Jack Nicholson’s old school military leader duped by Tom Cruise’s young gun lawyer into admitting wrong-doing. Based on a stage

Qualification Intel

A couple of my customers recently have shown me a one-page doc they use to assess deal Qualification. In the main, most sales training materials will have some kind of qualification checklist element. Probably the most widely known is “scotsman”. It suggests you should conjure up questions/scenarios that come

Get Positive or Roll Over, Loser

I was having one of those semi-intellectual chats you have after a bottle of fine 12-year old single malt whisky, with a top pal of mine. He’s quite into reading books on business and gave me a hefty tome from 91, called The Great Reckoning by James Davidson &

Qualification Gatekeepers, aka: Receptionist Dragons

My new boiler room guys in London have been having fun today. They’re going through the building-a-funnel phase from scratch. To do so, they need to i.d. suitable companies that could well be our customers of tomorrow. What they’re occasionally encountering is the British disease of gatekeeping,

Impact Words

Been doing some work with my customer service guys which I realise can help sales people. I’ve never been a fan of seeing the same word used more than once within a piece of prose, and I kept seeing ‘increase’ & ‘decrease’ cropping up in their reports with irritating

I Don't Need Any Help, Thanks

Just been training up a couple of super ‘boiler room’ guys in our London office. They’ll be spending most of their time over the next quarter getting up to speed and building a funnel. During our first few sessions, one of them asked how they should handle it when

Freakonomics for Sales

Heard about the “freakonomics” phenomenon? It’s all about the book written by a self-styled rogue economist, Steven Levitt, who feels that the discipline should be used to explain how the world really works, but lamentably seldom is. And pretty impressive a read it is too. He poses 5 random

It's Not About You

I’ve recently been trying to buy some new toys for my sales guys. And I’ve become infuriated beyond belief by the lack of care, appreciation and genuine interest the sales guys selling to me consistently showed towards me. For sure, they were all pally-pally. Cracked the funnies. Tried

Don't be a Magpie

Today I heard someone messing up, derided as a Magpie. Not knowing precise characteristics of said bird, fortunately the speaker immediately explained to the embattled salesperson for all our benefit. “You look from up on high, see something glisten and swoop down onto it, then move on when something else

Life On Mars persistence

I felt starved of genre-defining drama on TV since the turn of the new millennium. The 90s gave us innovative gems such as This Life, Between The Lines and Cracker, with even the Americans rising above their normal moral evangelism with the first season of NYPD Blue. But what’s