grapevine

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

In a first meeting in the morning, the potential customer started off by saying how they remembered the initial cold call from one of my guys as it was all about “retreat and repeat”.  I’d never heard this description before so asked what it meant. Apparently, it’s where

I took a step back during a meeting with a fella called Paul Walker recently.  He was giving me insight into how come his salesrep retention rates were the envy of his industry.  And impressive they are; average tenure being seven-and-a-half years. He believed a major reason was down to

Kyosei is pronounced, so I’m told, ‘kay-o-say’. Had an entertaining meeting early today with a guy called Phil Browne, with terrific growth plans for his Canon (photocopier to document management) reseller business.  His company has been going for several years, and we discussed their strategic theme; Kyosei. It’s

Been doing some work with my customer service guys which I realise can help sales people.  I’ve never been a fan of seeing the same word used more than once within a piece of prose, and I kept seeing ‘increase’ & ‘decrease’ cropping up in their reports with irritating