grapevine

A pal of mine is a purchasing expert. I know. How could I possibly cavort with the enemy 🙂 and even more amazingly, he was once a rep. We chatted about what people involved in a particular project I was working on (helping to ensure sales of cotton-related products) could do

Everyone knows that a sell-and-run merchant will get found out one day. All buyers absolutely loath such a salesperson. A plant involved in the cotton industry shared a tale with me about how they are trying to repair a relationship caused by just such unwelcome behaviour. A long-term vendor-consumer arrangement

I just saw a document presented to someone in the hope of gaining an order. It was one single sheet of paper and featured, rather prominently, a figure in the region of $75,000. It included payment terms, bank details for electronic funds transfer, and seven ‘product lines’, none with

I’ve unhappily borne witness to bosses that are bullies. Pressure cooker sales environments can cause the unacceptable to appear mundane. Yet it needn’t become pervasive. When I’ve seen sales management resort to bullying tactics it’s difficult to rein it in. Especially when the protagonist is answerable

Do you feel that objection handling as an art is one essential skill that few salespeople truly master?  As a cubrep, the process that got drummed into me involved five steps: Empathy, Explore, Confirm, Response, Action One of the reasons that I found it to work so well, is that

There’s very many situations that gain clearer expression with application of the good ol’ 2×2 matrix. When I delivered a day’s coaching on political mapping not long back, the assembled throng thought that the Product Market Grid was the earliest business example, yet a case could be

More BBC documentary action recently unfortunately featured a flagrant attempt to label John Madejski as an archetypal ‘money can’t buy happiness’ case study. As Britain’s 168th richest person when filming began (worth £325m) the film-maker was transparent in his efforts to show the glum side of extreme wealth.