Topic

grapevine

A collection of 649 issues

Closing Yellow Pages Trap Door

One of my recent customers is an extremely forward thinking company from the sales systems and support perspective. Even down to one of their top reps demanding they ran a sales blog of success. That very same fella, John from East Anglia described one of the facets to his account

Preventing Dissatisfaction Dip

A sales guy at a customer of mine articulated this issue to me beautifully the other day. A relationship proved to be healthy by the placing of an order for our wonderful piece of kit can deteriorate without us knowing post-sale. Setting expectations whilst prospecting can prevent this. Guiding the

Impact Players

I was lucky enough to just take on a team of Italians in a football friendly that I’ve played against twice before over in Rome. This time the match was at Leyton Orient’s training facilities in North London. With a large squad, banter was flowing before the game

Restaurant Lessons Shine

Twice this week I’ve been out in Cape Town. To Beuna Vista with my mate Brandon in Green Point, and Caveau next to Newlands rugby stadium with a crowd of us. Beuna Vista has always been a favourite haunt of mine, and I meet Bran many Monday’s there

Ask Your 'Tekkies' For Pitches

Speaking with a chap selling big ticket printing presses called Graham, I picked up a useful insight from him about intel he uses to throw into general “chit-chat” with prospects. With a portfolio in his bag including items costing well over a million, most potential buyers are aware they’ll

Incentive Effectiveness Example

What a terrific example of how incetives can work wonders. My great mate in Cape Town, Henry, runs an accounting Practice. With a government-imposed deadline on a particular filing requirement of 31 August looming, he realised normal productivity would not clear the inevitable backlog the authorities arbitrarily dreamed up. He

Blue Sky Perfect World

Just a couple of days ago, I had the delightful experience of one of my tekkies showing sparkling sales [http://salespodder.com/informal-requirements-analysis/] skill. And today I had a conversation with a fella of 20 years experience currently selling information to accountants. Amazingly, he uses the same approach to uncovering

Winning Major Accounts

Memories from a conversation with an MD of a datacomms type operation just now, are fresh with talk of Selling methodologies. These guys have an American corporate HQ that have got them to spend money on Miller-Heiman’s strategic selling. Part of the output included the famous ‘blue sheet’, which

Informal Requirements Analysis

Here’s an awesome application of a solution selling technique that one of my young coders hit me with the other day. And what a pleasure it was to hear. Alex wanted to know more about a particular app we’re developing internally to help productivity benefit from web 2.

Another Angle On 'No'

Sitting in yet another reception a Monday or two ago, I thumbed through the FT. An article about Business schools teaching by example [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/47515d92-0738-11dc-93e1-000b5df10621.html] naturally caught my eye. My personal exposure to the PR machine that is the Association of MBAs is many