Salespodder (Page 412)

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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

Discount on 2 Ferraris?

Met a thoroughly decent chap I’ve known on and off for a couple of years yesterday (Jeff) at the rather plush IoD building just off London’s Trafalgar Sq. He works as a ‘sales practitioner’, which to him means rather than being a sales-cum-training ‘consultant’, he actually gets on

The British Disease

I often say that if you can sell in the UK, you can sell anywhere. As a bunch, there are precious few dynamos around these islands, and the ones we’re lucky to produce tend to fly off and settle in far away climes. Nowhere is this more stark than

Lynch "Lap-Top Larries"

It happens all too rarely, I bumped into a pal at a prospect yesterday. Lovely to catch up, and it meant we cut straight to the chase. He described the company as an “awesome commodity distribution operation”. They’d just re-structured their salesteam, and one new charge is called Adam.

Red Arrow Focus; aka, squadron leader analysis

One of my valued customers runs a reseller event every year. At each one an ‘inspirational’ speaker is duly booked. This year’s was so good, most of the audience left the room wanting to join up. He was a squadron leader with the Air Force’s elite flying display