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grapevine

A collection of 657 issues

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

Note the 3 costs

A talking head from UK insurance giant Norwich Union (trying to rename itself Aviva at present) was on Channel4 News explaining why 4,000 jobs were being axed – despite making profits in the first half-year of a whopping £1.7bn. Apparently Indian call centres are the way forward because of

Sales Promotion Insanity

Met an interesting chap today called Nigel who ran a company with a highly lucrative future I’m sure. His main excitement (quite rightly) came from the ability to got people away from the “evil” of Outlook, and instead, actually be able to know what is in all their emails,