Topic

grapevine

A collection of 649 issues

Bigger Bullies Crash Louder

Waiting in reception of a potential supplier (those guys trying to persuade me to go with raw grads for new sales positions that I thought were a touch too pricey) I flicked through a mag called Director [http://www.director-magazine.co.uk/October06/lions.den.html]and an article about

What Kind Of Rep Are You?

When trying to recruit newbie sales people this week, I visited a firm that purports to offer something different in the way of graduate sellers. I feel their prices are at least 30% too high (especially considering you can recruit such resource at zero cost via milkround type initiatives and

Familiarity Breeds Success

Got stuck for a while in a reception this morning. Among the drivel of z-list celeb mags was a publication called Psychologies. When viewing the contents the horror of my perception was confirmed, as it looked like a long list of self-help rubbish for losers. My thumb-through uncovered one gem

Work hard for your money?

I’ve suffered the displacing emotion of buying a few things recently. For most categories of service/product I’m after, I can run a beauty parade. One such pagent led me to a young fella called ‘Kev’ on England’s south coast. I called him up first, he confirmed

Ever Seen A Baby Pigeon?

One of my friends in Cape Town hails from the mysterious luvvy infested world of advertising. A place filled with murkiness I cannot fathom, she told me of an event last week with a English speaker. He was a copy-writer from agency Young & Rubicon in London, who’d enjoyed

Why the 'Dear John'?

Forced to talk today about a bizarre, yet surprisingly frequent, sales knock-back which I was just involved with. A meeting with two fellas from a prospect ended in high spirits, both saying they liked what we do and would talk it over with a trio of their senior management colleagues

Retail idiots in Cape Town

So there I was in Cape Town and my local mobile number from the MTN network decided not to work. Having been in this position before, I went into one of their kiosks and asked for it to be re-activated. Unlike on the previous occasion, I was given flannel about

Benioff Talks Futures

Salesforce.com have hauled their ‘roadshows’ around England featuring an “inspirational keynote” (their words) speech by their founder. In the mid-90s, I witnessed a similar event, with a multimedia presentation from Tom Siebel at a Chicago crm show, so I was expecting an experience a bit like reading a how-to

Don't Forget To Write Business

Way back in the early 90s, a fella who’d given me my first ever formal sales training session, Welsh wonder Wynn Rees, called me up once I’d started a new job searching for a lead. At the end of the conversation he made sure I didn’t lose

Asking For Ice Cream

It’s lamentably not too often I say something that I realise when I say it was actually fantastic and I must say again, but that happened Friday morning. In with a prospect who loved what we do, he mentioned his boss (the MD) didn’t have a roaring track