grapevine

Came across a neat piece of best-practice from one of my customers in N Wales.  They sell handtools for the pro, to electrical wholesalers, engineers merchants and the like.  A new product was launched earlier this year that all the reps seemed to be impressed with.  They duly went out

What can you talk about when you face the brick wall of prospects saying they don’t need any help.  Especially when you’re cold calling for a meeting or the like.  In the specific instance they say things like: * “We’re doing fine as it is thanks” * “We’re

A few years ago I was on a BA flight to Cape Town, in the good old days when they at least had a decent radio channel on pop-business stuff and stewards without attitude, and I think it was some bloke called Bill McFarlan talking about the need to avoid

Had a thoroughly enjoyable meeting in the sunshine in the back garden of one of my customers Friday afternoon. Luckily we had silence as his kids were hooked to the live feeds of Big Brother inside. We were discussing motivating sales people who claim they’re highly money-orientated, yet their

Here’s another insight I gained this week.  I don’t know who this person is, but he was name-checked in a presentation I saw to fairly good affect.  A chap called Jim Morgan from ‘Purchasing’ back in 96 and the tantalisingly entitled “the best sales reps will take on

I saw a presentation by one of my customers from Greece this week, demonstrating how they’d won a big order to supply something to fulfil an Olympics need back in 2004 for Athens.  One of the slides was on dealing with ‘electronic media communication’.  Interestingly, it was thought many

I gotta lot of time for Derren Brown’s shows.  It’s really the way he has balls of steel to fool people, but without ever quite saying ‘I’m too clever for you’, like a sleight of hand magician too often does, and just doing enough to expose something

I feel very lucky sometimes that, being an enthusiastic student of selling, every single day something happens that either teaches me something new, or reinforces something I may well have forgotten. Yesterday I was having a business lunch.  Sounds decadent for 2006, but in reality was a simple burger and

I got a great idea from a first-time meeting just now.  I’ve been in several such forums recently, as I’ve just taken on lots of bright new sales people.  Anyway, without giving the crown jewels of my prospect away, the particular service they sell lends itself beautifully to

Yet more body-language type techniques I came across today.  I was with a sales force that 2-years prior had a boat-load of skills training around pitching and posturing.  During our discussion (and bear in mind we spent only 30 secs on this) it seemed to me like reading a page