Yeah, But...

I was in the company of lawyers the other day.  Yes, I did need a few cheeky whiskies to survive.  I enquired of them exactly how pitiful must legal training be when it comes to objection handling. Despite the supposed level of intelligence necessary to enter their brethren, and the

Please, Use A Quote I Can Relate To

It was lovely to be able to work from home yesterday afternoon and have the cricket on in the background. England Pakistan is finely balanced at the Oval. When the camera panned to the England dressing room, also Surrey home quarters, a huge quote is plastered in capitals on the

What Do You Think You Do?

I got chatting to a couple of people in a coffee shop yesterday as we moved tables around to provide elbow room for barista maintenance. After a few minutes of entertaining asides, one asked me what I did for a living. It made me realise what an incredibly revealing question

Web Conferencing Checklist

I spoke to an old compadre of mine that I’ve not seen for a few years the other night. I was delighted to hear his selling enthusiasm remain sky high, as he raced home to do a WebEx call with a prospect in a timezone 9 hours behind.  WebEx

Top Sales Outfit Secrets

Here’s a steer from a recent Selling Power article. The writer contends that the following five traits [http://www.sellingpower.com/content/article.php?nr=1&a=3] identify a world class selling operation. How do you fare on these? > Buyer Enablement – your focus is client goals

Executive Status

I realised a flaw in crm systems today. For the cynics out there I guess there’ll hardly be a shock reaction to that statement, but there are salespeople that love their recording tools, so please bear with me. I was party to a conversation where a senior exec was

Details Portray Care

I chuckled the other day, after work in a cafe unable to avoid hearing rantspam by a local. He was moaning about a company he’d thought of working for. The job it seemed, was as a commission-only financial advisor. He rocked up to their premises. It was a prestigious

How I Met Your Mother's Approach Anxiety

I’ve as yet not seen a full episode of American sitcom How I Met Your Mother [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother]. But I have stumbled across the closing seconds of one. The scene was set in an office, and the character Ted Mosby was

Mangled Ericspeak

How not to pitch. I watched an American called Eric Daniels [http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/eric-daniels] on newsbites yesterday. He had reason to be cheerful. The banking giant he currently runs was bailed out by the UK Government to the tune of £20bn. A welcome change in fortune

McKenna's Hypnotic Motivation

Doing the rounds on London promo-telly sofas over the previous weekend was Paul McKenna (wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McKenna] & own site [www.paulmckenna.com/]). Regular readers of my blogs will note that whilst I am fervently not in the camp of self-help guru sycophancy, I am however