Topic

grapevine

A collection of 653 issues

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

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