Topic

process

A collection of 171 issues

Process Means Goal

I remember watching live on Sunday night tv, the Panenka. Champion winning innovation. Next day in the school playground lapping up trying to emulate the incredible, deceptive, delicate dink as keeper dives away from the centre of the goal. Half-a-century on, we now have the Toney. Somehow, misfiring England reached

Test and Measure

I can often tell when a salesperson is unlikely to be one of the top performers. When I ask them about their process, they are vague, misguided or dismissive. Here are of four of the ways I hear these. They trot off the name of a, maybe even the latest,

Whilst Sales Productivity Isn't Quite Everything...

"Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long-run it is almost everything." Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman Given my recent, latest productivity related wail, I was astonished, ashamed even yet hardly surprised, to learn (via London's Telegraph Matthew Lynn) that UK public sector workers' output continues to crash. The past

Coherent Game Model

There's a lot of rot talked of succession planning[1]. I'm not a fan of what passes for the most common misguided efforts in this regard across the corporate world. It misses out on the fundamentals. The underlying mentality and systems that genuinely create sustainable, repeatable, adaptable success. Which are

Forensic Ecologist Digs

"The more symptoms, the better the diagnosis." As her Amazon profile states; 'Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist, botanist, and palynologist [the study of plant pollen and spores], and also has a background in environmental archaeology. She has worked with every police force in the United Kingdom, and on

POSIWID Selling

Stafford Beer. There was a guy. Responsible for perhaps the single most intellectually tough topic I ever tackled at B-school. And I was taught by maybe his right-hand man. That was his Viable Systems Model. (Tiplet; if you wish to remain sane, don't look it up.) I just googled. Apparently,

Art or Science?

It's a pop-psych question that can get to the core of how a salesteam will perform. One of those stunningly simple, yet deceptively revealing, quickfire This or That quizzings. Sales; art or science? When I myself began to adopt this style - with both prospects and colleagues alike - I

Desiderata

Defined as 'things you want and need', this could be a tad too ambiguous for many a solution seller. As a chasm can exist between the want and the need. Yet should you enjoy the situationship with an inquisitive prospect, you could use the term to run through what may

When Planning Traps You

To plan or not to plan? That is the sellers question. Can you boil down solution salespeople into two types? The planners and the unplanned? Those that diligently plot out how to get to a goal, set against those who fly by seat-of-the-pants, all spontaneity and improvisation? Perhaps that's a

Sales Is Not A Participation Medal Sport

I've witnessed the glaringly odd piece of corporate bizarrerie down the years when it comes to selling compensation. The Financials software team given a "sales holiday" because a particular new product wasn't ready. The blue-chip tech infrastructure team awarded bonus based on 100pc despite selling nothing because 'their marketing effort