Topic

academy

A collection of 124 issues

Questioning Conundrums

Had an enjoyable cheeky pint or three with a pal of mine last night who I’m happy to say is a youthful, successful software salesman for IBM. On two occasions he reminded me of a wonderful technique to use when confronted with an intransigent or provocative question. To have

Overcoming Voice Mail Barriers

Here’s a frightening quote I picked up just now; “statistically, about 87% of sales reps give up after a single half-hearted attempt, about 95% give up after a second message.” People that hide behind their voicemail are becoming ever more prevalent. How do you get around it? It’s

Asking For Ice Cream

It’s lamentably not too often I say something that I realise when I say it was actually fantastic and I must say again, but that happened Friday morning. In with a prospect who loved what we do, he mentioned his boss (the MD) didn’t have a roaring track

Easy 1 in 6ers

In the early 90s I read a fascinating book all about how technology products need to alter their selling mindset when trying to break into the mass-market, once enthusiastic first-adopters had already jumped on board. It’s by Geoffrey A Moore, called Crossing The Chasm. My attention was drawn to

Avoiding the fob off

When I was a nipper, my sales team ran cold-call competitions a couple of weeks before Christmas. It was called the Goose Fat week. Whoever uncovered the most number of suspects won big, which meant finding people that planned to look into what we sold over the next twelve months

Make "Informed Decision"

My boiler room guys are progressing nicely in London. They’ve been getting a decent number of pitches out there to gain meetings with companies in our sweet spot. A couple of times though, with a pitch only half-delivered, literally a nano-second into it, some people have simply said they’

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,

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

Managing the Sven Way

Great to see England come back from a (wonder goal) behind to beat Uruguay Wednesday night. Still all coming together nicely for the World Cup of course. There was a documentary on about the manager’s approach to getting the best out of his players recently. I made some notes

Impressive Recall

I was annoyed with myself on Monday, when I was discussing plans with a prospect. We got to talking about their recently launched new products. They were rightly excited about them, and I wanted to know more, so started asking about each. Yet I couldn’t for the life of