grapevine

Someone I fleetingly know walked up to me the other day and asked that wince-inducing question, “what do you think of network marketing?”  I duly squirmed through the next five minutes of chat, trying to politely put him off the idea. Later, I dug through my old files to find

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

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

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

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

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

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