salespodder

salespodder

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Voicemail Approach & Getting Mobile Numbers

With the abundantly destructive voicemail culture prevalent in the global buying community, one way around this cold-calling prevention malaise is through the classic out-of-hours approach. Calling before 9 and after 5:30 will often lead to someone other than a doorman-bouncer-esque receptionist fielding your call, and putting you straight through.

Promoting & Spreading Best-Practice

Ever since reading a couple of days ago about ‘sales knowledge management’ being a key issue for sales team leaders (the foot of this post [http://salespodder.com/is-your-selling-changing/]), I’ve noted a couple of entertaining happenings about the drive to get best-practices spread across sales teams. At one label-printing

Is your 'selling' changing?

The age old question How To Get More Leads, has been the starting point for increased revenue drives for nearly 30 years, but times now must change. This is the message from a research paper by www.csoinsights.com [http://www.csoinsights.com] I got sent by a currently courting

Gartner conference themes

7-8 March saw the 2-grand a ticket Gartner crm conference [http://www.gartner.com/2_events/conferences/crm8i.jsp] in London. I spoke to a highly experienced fella the day after that’d been one of the speakers. His slot examined current implementation issues with a case study from his

Unavoidable Process Creep

Here’s a tale I picked up late Friday night, when speaking on the phone with a recently recruited sales manager at one of my customers. He has two particular charges tasked with penetrating a prospect community of around 60 organisations. To track what’s occuring with them, the pair

Dan Kennedy Sales Spam

As you may know, I am often ambivalent towards the multitude of self-styled ‘sales gurus’. There are a number I quite rate. Tom Hopkins [http://salespodder.com/?p=20]’ is one such winner. Yet my mind changes channel with those that let their so-called ‘personality’ interfere with their message. Particularly

Turn '10 Minutes of Fame' into Process

I’m often asked what other sales teams do to enliven sales meetings. Most follow a tried and trusted pattern; figures, roasting/champagne, admin, touch of training, marketing/production/operations update, specialist speaker. I visited a product-labelling business last week where it was one of the occasions I wondered how

Small businesses pack a Sales Punch

In my line of work I’ve come across numerous sales trainer-cum-consultancy outfits. Whether they range from one-man bands (the largest sector in the UK) or huge multinationals, one trait remains in place. Namely, most are not the kind of people you really should be employing. I’ve been in

Stand-Up To Meeting Madness

What’s the biggest waste of a rep’s time? Well, coming second of course, but post-deal fire-fighting and spurious meetings run this close. I mention this as I had a nightmare journey to Cambridge from London. A plastic bag wrapped around a power-line and all hell broke loose on

In-house tweaking reality

Two conversations this past week re-affirm what a nightmare sales systems become when an internal, technical resource wields more power about them than they deserve. The first features a sales trainer that’s been supplying mind-mapping software to a client of his for a couple of years for sales-idea generation