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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

Ask for the order, please

I’ve been doing loads of interviews over the past ten days or so. And it’s really starting to do my head in. Spending a good while on the phone with potential candidates is a winner, yet even when they sound fairly good, it can all fall to pieces

Against something cheaper? Try "Priming"

Came across a salesguy called Stuart Glimstead at one of my customers earlier today, who had a response for when a prospect starts going on about cheaper competition. His first retort is simply “why do you think they’re cheaper?” He finds this begins to place a seed of doubt

Training isn't Permament

I’ve long got frustrated at salesforces that have a boat-load of training, which then never seems to make a difference. What typically happens, is that any info imparted goes in one ear and out the other. Actual ‘Recall’ of what was run through can be pretty low even the