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grapevine

A collection of 657 issues

Lean Principles

Around two decades ago, Quality was the management buzzword. Since then we’ve progressed, from Business Process Engineering through to eCommerce. In the same way high street fashion recycles, so it seems do business fads. Quality makes a return in the guise of Lean Principles. As seen on the BBC’

Chief Exec Involvement

The Miller-Heiman solution selling mailing list received an invite to participate in their annual best-practice survey last week. They teasingly included their favourite finding from last year’s [http://www.slideshare.net/alinutley/miller-heiman-sales-best-practice]. Only 7% of companies qualified inside their definition of “world-class”. I realise that you could cloud

Size Assessors & Deal Finders

Wonder how the largest of businesses approach their sales funnel building at the moment? I found out interesting facts about the IT Services division of HP, effectively EDS as-was, and their strive this year to secure private sector mega-deals totalling a couple of billion. Clearly, there’s a relatively small

8 Word Mission

A recent HBR blog post underlines the importance of ‘message’ brevity. Anchored in strategic management, The Eight-Word Mission Statement [http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2010/10/the_eight-word_mission_stateme.html] has wonderful connotations for the salesperson. In the same way as it’s vital a company gets across

Sense Of Curiosity

Renowned for his stunning architecture, Mokena Makeka now heads up his own show. When I recently learned [http://www.hansatopdogs.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=194:mokena-makeka&catid=89:mokena-makeka] of his success, his breakthrough work was suggested as re-defining police stations in

Trim That Pitch

I frequently blog on the virtues of short, sharp, snappy pitching. Here’s yet more corroboratory evidence. Workshopped to advise tech start-ups how to deal with the press and opinion forming bloggers, three of this Boston USA conference’s [http://masstlcun.blogspot.com/] 43 tips are useful general pitching pointers.

Latest Forecourt Tricks

A chap called Matt Bath was talking about his findings at consumer filter Which? when I was having my breakfast the other day. [http://www.which.co.uk/cars/] “Forewarned is forearmed” was his hope for potential car buyers as he divulged the latest underhand tricks appearing in showrooms. He

Tech-heads un-Cloud tips

One of my coders enthused about something he called Digg Reel the other day. (There’s a handful on vimeo [http://vimeo.com/digg] by way of example). It’s a collection of video snippets where those at the helm of the technocracy share their wisdom. I was helpfully informed

Slow Economy Sales Boosts

Shame on me. My web 2.0 engagement is lamentably low. I clicked on an auto-LinkedIn mail the other day as dozens of people have apparently invited me to be ‘connections’. It’s been literally years since I ‘connected’ myself. I was delighted to find their Answers action still had

Leadership Myth Debunked

There’s an annual British Science Festival on at the moment. It slyly never fails to generate endless hours of material for afternoon radio phone-ins. One of this year’s headlines [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/british-science-festival-2010] though happily had some decent meat to it from a sales perspective.