Topic

grapevine

A collection of 635 issues

Standard Setting

Sainsbury’s were the UK’s number one supermarket in the Eighties, only to be overtaken by Tesco in the Nineties. They remain unsurprisingly keen to claw back their slipped ground. Through the joy that is Noughties business reality tv, I caught a small convenience-store employee of theirs used as

Professional Services Marketing

I attended a presentation the other evening billed as how to fight your way through the credit crunch recession using lessons from when lawyers and accountants gain more clients. Whilst it failed to deliver anything earth-shatteringly new or unique on this score (but then perhaps merely confirming ‘basics’ was the

Textbook Buying A Car

All salespeople are lousy buyers. We are generally easily sold, get distracted by the sales technique of the vendor and tend to be unable to apply the mirror of the skills that make us successful sellers. I came across a delightful five-minute snapshot of how you should go about buying

Two Influence Acronyms

Do you have any core key viewpoints when it comes to working out the extent to which you’ve managed to persuade people to your way of thinking? I heard someone mention their pair of such guiding principles today. They were simply: > DIY – do it yourself DTA – don’t trust

Buyer Pen-Top Trickery

Last night I shared a thoroughly enjoyable evening with a friend involved in a project to train up 15,000 buyers in the National Health Service in the dark arts of negotiation. When I asked him what his favourite techniques were, I’m sorry to report that he had a

Used Car Price Handle

How unusual is this? Encountering a used-car salesman that deploys a decent sales technique. I found myself in a garage the other day and was treated to a few minutes of spot-on pitching from a fella who’s father had started the business in 1967. He soon realised that one

How Project Managers Think

It can often seem that to be a successful salesperson, you need to have immense project management skills. Especially in more complex deals, the way you need to bring people in and out and manage several different individual expectations and opinions can mark the deal-making difference. I mentioned this to

Think Like McKinsey's

Although I heard this second-hand (from a legal friend of mine that has a close pal working out of Atlanta in America for large business consultant McKinsey [http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/]) the message is remarkably succinct. My friend began his wisdom with the preface that everything he’s heard confirms

Tackling Tricky Client Re-engagement

One of my customers has a world-beating piece of mission critical software for a specific niche. As such they have a fiercely loyal user-base, with an industry-envied 85% of their sites being reference-able. As with all niche strategies, possible de-railing issues can crop up, like these three I’ve just

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