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grapevine

A collection of 657 issues

The Lamb's Really Good

It’s so rare that when it happens I’m compelled to celebrate. Someone in retail knows how to sell. Gavin is the kind of South African that gives you hope the country can in fact survive the lunacy endemic in the current regime and give rise to a true

Turnaround One-Liners

Here’s an interesting initiative from inside a customer of mine. Their Sales Ops support has just gained an excitable fresh momentum from one of their best and longest serving reps being awarded a sabbatical, with nationwide remit to improve individual sales skills. One of the first things he’s

What Do Buyers Actually Do?

One of my customer’s salesreps, Tony, was determined to impress upon me how appalled he is with buyers at the moment. He sells engineering consumables, and his patch breaks down like this: 1600 – prospect companies with potential to buy 370 – customers, outfits that have bought 200 – number of organisations

Lesson From St Bob

Bob Geldof isn’t renowned for his subtlety. So I was surprised to hear him say on a tv documentary (The Pink Floyd Story: Which One’s Pink?) that in order to get the 4 band members back together again, after their acrimonious disintegration, he couldn’t bring himself to

Door Opening Dependency

Enjoyed reading an article in yesterday’s FT about Cheshire flooring entrepreneur Dawn Gibbons [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/09d03f16-ad86-11dc-9386-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1] . Part of it recounted the tale of how she met her favourite marketing consultant. It’s a great story of how he, Dennis Humphries

Understanding The Business Window

Here’s a technique one of my customers uses to align what they can offer to where their prospect states they want to go. They call it the Business Window, and in the words of their Head of Sales, Dave, a chap I’ve a lot of time for, the

Less Big Picture

Loved the one-year-on Gerry Robinson back at the NHS show last night. I blogged on his findings before and again there are a couple of terrific pointers for reps. He gave a talk to NHS staff saying “it isn’t the big picture stuff” that creates success. Instead, it’s

The Luxury Of Choice

At a customer sales meeting recently, they ran a session on the pitfalls of Sam Salesperson. Sam was struggling. After one promising quarter, the next two missed target. The problem was an age-old one; not enough prospects. This proved to be a double-edged sword, for not only did it mean

Brooks Law Pitch

Surfing last night for a bit of relaxation, I realised that there are a number of blogs I like, but the google reader app doesn’t make it as neat as it could be to have your ‘web inbox’ show you what’s of interest. So I caught up with

Motor Show Syndrome

Here’s an interesting point picked up from a customer of mine that suffers every four years. The problem is that there’s a huge show in Germany every leap year. This heralds every major player’s new products. It’s big ticket capital equipment, and customers in that industry