Salespodder (Page 350)

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Standing Out For Good

A BBC News Hard Talk interview with Graham Poll turned up an interesting gem. He’s a former football ref who officiated at two World Cups. The questioner asked whether he shared the lay-man’s commonly held belief that a good referee is an invisible one. Poll replied that this

Mapping The Process

Whenever you first move into the seemingly murky world of solution selling, someone usually takes you to one side and suggests that the fog of war can be lifted by “mapping the process”. With specific regard to sign-off procedures, I had a reminder of this when recently helping out on

If A Baboon Can Do It...

I recently spent a couple of hours in the wonderful company of a baboon troop, one of eleven around South Africa’s Cape Point Peninsula. I was fascinated not only by our cousin’s behaviour, but just as much by the story surrounding the fight to protect them. It seems

Sales Secretary Re-Emergence?

I had a meeting with a chap called Francois tasked with setting up a new division for a firm that, in his words, provide software and services around ‘incident and warranty management’. This past decade they grew, mainly by acquisition, from 70 to 700 people. They’ve recently rolled out

Bank Manager's Top 2 Business Plan Failings

Will the lengthy and deep downturn trigger a long period of almost static economic performance or worse still, become a double-dip recession? This is a question taxing the financial press, yet many of the people I speak to, working in the field day-in, day-out, seem more optimistic. One such chirpy

What Happens Next

An exchange I was privy to the other day reminded me of how often I’ve cringed when hearing a sales manager talk to one of their charges about a deal. How is it that so often senior people forget how they themselves wanted to be treated when they were

Hidden Magic Bullet

One sure-fire way to detect the experience of a solution seller is from their readiness to shoot-off their best piece of armoury. My favoured general rule is to ignore what many would think that logic may suggest. For instance, if you feel that your best sales point is your price,

Trustful Sales Partnerships

Graham Swann’s recent jibe that England continue to single-handedly keep Test cricket alive became a nail-bitingly brilliant mantra for the final day’s play in Cape Town’s drawn Third Test. With the final rubber about to start, I spent some downtime flicking on the cricketing web through recent

Hit Hard And Fast

I’m involved on a project aiming to launch a technologically advanced product into an arena where legislation has removed any current viable options. There’s a yawning market gap compounded by substitute solutions being woefully inadequate. The entry-level version of the product will retail at around $40. It is

Gastropub Food Growth

Having recently spent many fun-filled days with, among others, a friend that owns a cool chain of London pubs as England somehow salvaged a draw in the Cape Town Test, I learnt plenty about the intricacies of running a gastropub. One insight was when an order in Capetonian institution, Forresters,