Topic

academy

A collection of 126 issues

Binary Beasts

Yesterday I facilitated a thoroughly engaging solution sales workshop. The intent was to introduce a twelve-strong team to what entering this arena entails, given their historical emphasis on relationship and product orientated selling. The live projects this $40m team worked through typically shared around a dozen key players, long cycles

Cold Calling Valid Business Reason (VBR)

Flicking through Miller-Heiman’s online resources, a pdf entitled Phone Prospecting Strategies To Get Your Foot In The Door naturally caught my eye. The meat was on a single page, which is always a winner, although not so good were the accompanying cover and back sheets. They’re superfluous and

Effective Competitive Intelligence

There was an event I was unfortunately unable to attend that I recently received some collateral from afterwards. It was on a subject that interests me partly because I myself often get paid for providing a type of service in this arena to salesteams, namely competitive intel. My analysis on

Hard v Soft Targets

What a thoroughly enjoyable couple of drams I had with a friend the other night. Among his many skills, he’s a college lecturer. He was busily bemoaning the target culture in British education and aghast at how widely it misses the mark. He felt that the purpose of targets

Presentation Trinity

Enjoyed a few cheekies with a pal the other night, and before watching the awesomeness that is this years Champions League, he asked me what quick-fire tips I could give him for how to make an effective presentation. With only a blink’s worth of thinking time, and under 60secs

Ensuring Haggle Win-Win

Salespeople are notoriously inept negotiators. This isn’t a criticism at all. They are two entirely different disciplines. A bit like finding an actor that’s become a fine musician, or the other way around. It hardly ever happens. Apparently, we in the UK are shedding our centuries of reserve

IT Project Attraction

Many solution sellers inhabit the world of IT sales. I was talking to a coder friend of mine (with a Masters degree [http://www.nyit.edu/] in his craft) about what’s currently going down in his world when buying such technology. He told me about a neat 3-part evaluation

Target The Core Group

Rummaging through old magazines, with a view to recycling and freeing up unnecessarily tied up space during a Bank Holiday weekend, a raft of Booz Allen Hamilton’s journals presented themselves. Always partial to a touch of strategic thinking, I was delighted when one article shed welcome light on a

What's On Your Dashboard?

I’ve always been a big fan of the dashboard approach. My first exposure to it was nearly twenty years ago now. I’d got the nod on a large deal for what today is called ERP, but back then was simply ‘financials and distribution’ software. As part of the

Provocation-Based Selling

I’ve just come across a fascinating clash of viewpoints that, quite rightly, highlight how the slightest of nuance can make a huge difference to people. Despite having only seen what’s publicly posted, this exchange strikes me as of paramount importance to b2b vendors in the next 24 months