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grapevine

A collection of 657 issues

Know your "latch-lifters"

Here’s a wonderful gem unearthed when I spoke Wedensday with a fella that’d been selling for his present (multinational blue-chip) employers since 1969. Originally from Doncaster, he was dropped off in the middle of Edinburgh by his boss (from Leeds apparently) with a load of samples and told

Total Account Management

Anyone remember “TQM”? If you do, relax, Total Account Management in the terms I’ve recently discovered it has nothing to do with such early-90s Quality drives. ‘Phew’ I can hear you sigh. Steady on, though, as some TQM problem solving techniques are awesome and deserve a second-chance…..but I

CSI Selling Tip

I was forced to watch an episode of the American CSI output Sunday. It was the one set in Vegas. In days of yore I loved watching all those really intelligent ‘new breed’ of detecting shows. I refer to the ones that make the effort to go deeper, like Morse,

More Sales Reality TV

The doyen of business reality telly has got to be ex-ICI Chairman John Harvey-Jones, with his awesome Troubleshooter series throughout the early Nineties. Since then, several pop-tv shows have introduced helping businesses escape dire straits (like the aforementioned show), pitting contestants against one another for dream jobs, through to start-up

Buying on Price? Then prepare to pay twice….

Things often happen in 3s don’t they? At customers & prospects this very week, I’ve come across three separate instances of the same thing. (I wrote about one in detail [https://salespodder.com/can-you-match-that-price/] just a couple of days ago) In each case, sales people have yelped in

Can You Match That Price?

Had an enjoyable lunch yesterday with a good guy called Keith, where we were talking about how to arm a prospect so that when their boss looked at two opposing quotes, when ours is the more expensive we can still prevail without dropping our pants. And when I got home

Delivery Innovation?

Met a prospect today with an enviably impressive track record. Founded by a dozen people, ten of them Directors, at the turn of the century, they already sell £29m of lighting product to trade wholesalers. Their first strapline was “Halogen Lighting Specialists”. This distinguished them from other competitors, who sold

New Sales Manager Turnaround, Blair-stylee

So Tony B-Liar finally ended his tenure of Number Ten. Paxo hosted a Newsnight Blairathon to assess his ‘legacy’. Unfortunately it included Alistair Campbell, which made me wonder how many of Newsnight’s 1½m loyal devotees view him as one of Britain’s most odious men, but at least

Learning From 'Cool' Brands

Lucky enough to stay in one of those trendy boutique type hotel [http://www.hotelduvin.com/]s over the recent bank holiday weekend, the type you like ‘cos it doesn’t remind you of your grandmother’s house, there is a noticable absence of dado rails and porcelain ornaments like

The Golden Hour

Britain is in the grip of collective trauma after a three-year old toddler’s abduction from an Algarve holiday apartment. The local police force face a barrage of complaint from The Fourth Estate, as the Portugese authorities don’t do communication. At best bizarre, at worst inexcusable, this outdated behaviour