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grapevine

A collection of 657 issues

A 1 in 7 Cross-Sell

I found myself in the bedlam that is Hamleys Regent St toy store on a half-term Saturday. Battling my way through to the tills, I plonked my fancy dress party accessories for that evening on the counter with a sense of relief. The bill came to £32.98. Only half

Crawling For Crumbs

There’s yet another reality show on telly devoted to business. Seeking to emulate success scaled by The Apprentice, Natural Born Sellers you’d have thought, by dint of title alone, would be terrific. Unfortunately, everything that makes the siralun show win has been jettisoned in this effort. Schedulers have

Renewing Dampened Enthusiasm

We’ve all been there. You’ve a new idea that you’re convinced your bosses will love. A new product you know will change your customer’s life. Excitedly, you deliver an impassioned pitch. Their response? Yawns, at best. Demoralisation crushes your pride. There are countless examples of world-beating

Post Neo-Classical Pitching

We appear to have bumbled into credit crunch followed by financial meltdown. The left-of-centre governments of Clinton and Blair over a decade ago, to little Opposition, led the encouragement of lenders to allow people to borrow mountainous sums, with little recourse to whether the interest payments could be maintained, let

Thaw Spend Freeze

I suspect that virtually all of us are experiencing that the credit crunch is biting. I had a couple of cheekies after stumps with a pal of mine Thursday night who’s responsibilities include managing financial risk and reducing borrowing costs for one of the most well-known global luxury retail

Implementation Hand-Holding

I was reminded recently of an all-too-often overlooked part of the sales cycle; implementation. How often do we cringe when hearing of ‘salesrep-sold-and-ran’ tales? Ink barely dry, commission already spent, and the customer left in the lurch as a new set of faces takes over part-petrified, part-clueless? The ‘spin’ exponents,

Another Forecast Spreadsheet

One of my customers shared with me the parallel reporting that has since resoundingly taken the place of their ditched Goldmine crm. It’s a single worksheet they call the Schiffman Board. It seems that with usage of Goldmine having tailed off to practically no use at all, a new

Are You A True Choice Architect?

I gained recent exposure to the current big-buzz right-wing think tank concept of Nudge. Rather than telling people to do things, it advocates instead that you let them make their own journey to where you suggest they go. Key to the concept is the use of influence as a Choice

Tech VC Pitch Tips

Most reps I know don’t get über-geeks. Whether it be the billionaires that strike gold ten minutes after founding internet giants like Google, Myspace and Youtube, and the similarly vulgar-rich from pre-web software land-grabbers like Gates, Jobs or Ellison, or right through to the ‘kid’ that sits in a

Your Personal Channel-Force

Spoke with a pal of mine working inside the colossus that is IBM. Salesteam morale has just taken a bit of a battering, as the structure of all sales contracts has just shifted due to economic slowdown fears. Whilst Management claim the high-achievers will do better, the water-cooler chat is