quirky

Familiar with systems thinking? What’s the worse waste of a salesperson’s time? There are traditionally two sources of extreme wastefulness: Coming second on a deal. Post-sale customer service fire-fighting. They’ve been stand-out traumas for aeons. Nowadays a third nudges these. Latter-day technological capability has seen compiling irrelevant

When sitting next to a salesperson when they meet their prospect, I’ve long since realised the value of keeping stumm. One rare exception to this policy is when you sense they’ve run off course. Specifically, when you hear a list of endless, machine gun fire, ‘situation’ questions. They’

There I was, minding my own business in a quiet English suburb when the house I was visiting had a knock on the door. I heard a voice with a West African flavour introduce himself. > “Hello, I’m Lewis. I’m here to help you with your cavity wall

A pal of mine was renovating his house. I happened to pop ’round when he was trying to find a mini-skip. A quick websearch found several local suppliers. Three quotes later, one duly earned a call back to order. [http://www.selectaskip.co.uk/skip-hire] He spent a long time

[http://www.bitterwallet.com] Here’s a post from a couple of years back by a consumer champion site who’s cheek I quietly enjoy from time to time. Their aim was to stop you from making that disastrous impulse buy. Thesefive pointers [http://www.bitterwallet.com/tips-to-curb-your-impulse-spending/15573] are

Here’s a half-hour item to put on your next internal sales meeting agenda if you get to set suchlike. A moment of levity that can make an important point. Have you an issue that can be given this treatment [http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_

I know only a rare few solution sellers that are good at this. Yet it is an essential part of the job. I even provided a web app a few years ago to support larger salesteams in their reference quest. One salesteam I helped made each salesperson produce a glowing

Here’s a reminder about a wheeze among the oldest of sales lines. A friend of mine was having difficulty finally pinning down a prospect to a signature. His frustration was magnified by the distance involved between him and his prospect. 4,500 miles, one ocean and several time zones.

Here’s a wonderful idea with two strands of sales insight. It comes from the Blackberry device makers, Research In Motion (RIM). The story starts shortly after their 1997 IPO. As the stirrings of dotcom mania raced towards a maddening burst bubble, RIM’s co-founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis,

Here’s something extremely useful I picked up from an old HBR [http://hbr.org/2010/01/the-hbr-list-breakthrough-ideas-for-2010/ar/1]. Each year it seems they suggest ten breakthrough ideas for the coming twelve months. Last year’s first was a belter. What really motivates workers – understanding the value of progress