Salespodder (Page 381)

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Team Bonding Beyond Beers

The regular gag of lament among sales trainers is to often mock Sales Management’s widely held view that the best form of ‘team bonding’ is to take the reps out for a slap-up beano. If you’re in a team where this logic prevails, then perhaps you can take

Keeping Attention

Two separate experiences have reminded me of the difficulties that surround not just engaging an audience, but of actually maintaining their interest. In one paper this morning, a “communications consultant” trots advice [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4799417.ece] out for Gordon Brown. As one of the

Groundswell Selling

As part of my current product development, I bought a couple of books to feast on, rather than rely on web-based morsels to further my knowledge. One I picked up from an airport bookshelf had an intriguing title, “Groundswell, winning in a world transformed by social technologies” yet thoroughly uninspiring

Do You Share The Millionaire Secrets?

Americans. Is it true that the only people that love them are themselves? Despite their generally mystifying and atrocious self-help industry, I came across a promising ‘web channel’ called Big Ideas and a clip from Marci Shimoff. Tangentially related to selling I admit, she quotes research to illuminate the 5

Even Boffins Get It Wrong

Over the past week the physicists on the Franco-Swiss border have achieved remarkable global media coverage. The CERN labs, most famous it seems for giving us the internet, have just switched on their latest supergizmo. When I first heard of it, I’m pretty sure its raison d’etre was

Implementation Hand-Holding

I was reminded recently of an all-too-often overlooked part of the sales cycle; implementation. How often do we cringe when hearing of ‘salesrep-sold-and-ran’ tales? Ink barely dry, commission already spent, and the customer left in the lurch as a new set of faces takes over part-petrified, part-clueless? The ‘spin’ exponents,

Allow Power Browsing

Escaping the rain from the second Summer in a row to be a washout in London yesterday, I read an article in one of those supplement sections of newspapers aimed, I think, at people with more time on their hands than they deserve. As my heated panini did its trick,

A Smile And A Shoeshine

In a remarkable career progression, one-time fabric rep Laurie Taylor became a sociology Professor. As such, he created a ½hr documentary on BBC Radio 4 about the perceptions of travelling salesmen (the iPlayer link will likely disappear in a week, so to hear again, you may need to try searching

Beyond Persistence

I’ve been steadily refining my cold-call pitch, as I spend a couple of hours a day, three days a week, on my mini-project to sell my new service to companies that are not existing clients. I got to thinking what happened almost everytime I arrived at a first meeting

Consider Your Shadow Reporting

During a thoroughly enoyable meeting with a chap that ran a salesteam of eight about their reporting needs as a company, the issue of Shadow Reporting arose. I was exploring more knowledge of what makes crm installs collapse so dramatically. In this case, they’d tried Salesforce, Maximiser & Netsuite.