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grapevine

A collection of 657 issues

Funnelling Before Proposition

The New Year’s kicking in. All my customers don’t seem to stir from their slumber ’til next Monday, so I’m taking the opportunity to do those chores salespeople hate; housekeeping. During my tidying up, I’ve already come across some docs I picked up at a customer

Forecasting Focus

Fairly regularly I get to rant about the prevalence of all-too-abysmal forecasting routines. A pal of mine (congrats on the new baby, Bren!) currently has his charges attribute one of these tags to deals: 1. Drop Dead (you don’t miss this) 2. Commit (deals you feel will come in

Team Cold Call Incentives

A company I know have just appointed a new guy to their sales helm. I’ve heard plenty about his lack of talent, so we’ll wait for the results which at some point will tell their story either way. One of his early initiatives was to encourage more cold-calling

The Customer In The Right Story

Over a coffee this afternoon, I decided to read the emailed newsletter from one of my suppliers for a change. Y’know the thing? You get sent them regularly, but never bother reading them. I s’pose the difference with this one was that it came this time from their

What's My Daily Rate?

A potentially attractive new opportunity has recently surfaced through one of my customers. In the old days, we used to do a whole bunch of sales-related activities that added significant value to our clients, such as attending sales meetings and making consultant-type recommendations on how they could sell more. We

Any Spare Budget?

Logged on this morning and got an email from a prospective supplier. Market-initiators Webex provide web-conferencing, and I’ve dabbled with their services (which are pretty good) in the past although for my game, a face-to-face is essential. So they sent me this mail below. And it gave me a

Happy Sales Reps?

I’ve spent far too much time lately hanging around at the behest of the world’s most inefficient organisation, the NHS. Every British politician you hear talk about our health service says all the staff are wonderful and it’s the envy of the world. What a load of

What's The Return, Again?

With a decent glass of Piemonte vini rossi, I was happily snug in a Torino bar around midnight and glanced over to see a copy of the International Herald Tribune. Make no mistake about it, this paper is useless. So many have tried to make an ‘international newspaper’ and failed

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