Topic

grapevine

A collection of 649 issues

Acknowledge Sales Backward Planning Realities

As the name implies, this technique takes as its starting point where you want to go, and works backwards from it to pinpoint what needs to happen to get there. A client of mine recently paid an external consultancy to work theirs out for them and make a plan. Without

Presentation Pauses & Structure

How many presentation skills training courses have you been on? It’s possibly the most common kind of sales-y training non-reps go on. There’s positively oodles of tips around the web, and to add to that surfeit, here’s three hints I took when hearing an explanation of just

Support, Don't Obstruct

Spent an engaging session with a newly appointed sales manager called Mark at a London prospect, who amongst many things, bemoaned why at his last place they mysteriously ripped out a bespoke system (despite it having universal rep approval) and replaced it with a Siebel one (which all the reps

Overcome Initial Resistance

Rocked up at a place a few Monday morning’s ago and almost immediately qualified out. Not only was it little more than a trade counter selling tools, so not my target market at all, but the fella in charge, Frank, said that no appointment was in fact arranged, and

Stumbling Over A Close

We all know closing should be a smooth process, one where we preferably ask for the order without there being any discernible change in conversation flow, and so that the prospect wasn’t even aware we closed them. Yet on Wednesday, I found myself in the middle of a couple

Track Your Propositions

Had one of those delicious moments of dawning earlier today. Many sales teams I meet are disillusioned with their ‘crm’, to the point of jettisoning the whole shabang. In their place, quasi-random spreadsheets or word process docs float around. One omnipresent reason for such abandonment, is that reps simply hardly

Raise prices to win business

May 2007 saw a chap called Jon Hunt earn £388m from selling his estate agency founded in 1981. Most observers paint an unpleasant picture of this chap [http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-16617607-details/Foxtons+boss+quits+to+set+up+rival/article.do] , which considering his achievements could be sour

Can You Increase Sales 14-Fold?

I read a summary of a recently released biography on abrasive Ryan Air boss Michael O’Leary last Sunday. I heard not so long ago that the Irish low-fare pioneer was the 3rd biggest airline in the world by market capitalisation. I was hoping the article would give an insight

Using Call-Off Selling

At a number of sales operations recently I’ve come across this great tactic. A “call-off contract” estimates a total amount of spend over a period of time, and gains commitment that an amount of deliverable can be obtained in return. Services that utilise this technique include such diverse items

Offering Credible Discounts

At an internal sales meeting I attended last week at one of my customers, the boss asked why it was that the reps always talk about round figure discounts? Typically in increments of 2½ percent? At the bottom of a quote is often a line something like “less discount – 15%