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quirky

ideas and experiences with a selling angle that come from left-field

Breaking The Unbreakable

A couple of weeks later, you’re maybe ready to laugh about it. In the days before laptops I remember walking up shaky portacabin stairs in a gale-strewn mid-winter with a colleague and dropping a ludicrously expensive and commensurately weighted server. The damage suffered meant that the machine would turn

Childlike Positivity

Someone with extensive experience dealing with special needs children was telling me the other day how you should frame a request in a way that doesn’t tell somebody to do something. As most of us will acknowledge, issuing a military-style command can miserably miss the desired results. Screaming “you’

Training Returns

I’m often asked to run ‘training’ sessions among my clients. The nature of the actual ‘event’ is typically either a session around 90-minutes as part of a broader Sales Conference-style agenda, homing-in on one specific sales element (most commonly about selling new products at the moment) or a full

Hyperactive Prospects

In a doctor’s waiting room the other day I flicked through a pamphlet with tips to deal with ADHD children [http://www.homethroughhomework.co.za/tips.html]. Quite bizarrely I found most of them offered highly applicable tactics when faced with a difficult prospect – tricky in the sense of

Infidelity Alerts

Over a round of toast laden with wonderful organic honey, my morning tea break led me to this delightfully paranoid article in the Times exposing 10 tips for spotting an unfaithful partner [http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article6875980.ece] . I instantly visualised the parallels

Choice Of Two

A crew of us were enjoying breakfast opposite the building site that feels worryingly incomplete at Cape Town’s world cup venue, as the 3½ yr-old among us happily turned our table into a race-track for his toy car. When presented with menu options, the toddler seemed restless. Fortunately it

How Distinctive Is Your Differentiator?

There’s an event on Thursday in Cape Town aimed at creating a community for wannabe tech start-ups, the name of which gives you the gist; Silicon Cape [http://www.siliconcape.com/]. Explaining the concept to me, one of the attendees gave an interesting example of a previous attempt to

Tap Into Happiness

So according to a Welsh psychologist, 19 June [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5575435/Happiest-day-of-the-year-is-June-19-according-to-formula.html] was the one day of the year when we should have all been at our happiest. Did you feel the vibe? I asked my chief developer in Cape Town this very

Different Colour Shades

For a couple of hours the other day I learned about agri-business planning. The first time I touched this industry was during a couple of years in the early 90s, with exposure to the logistics and sales operations of various meat and dairy producers. The next was to be on

Be A Menu Engineer

Here’s a fella that strikes me as owning his niche. American Gregg Rapp [http://www.menutechnologies.net/] says he’s specialised for two decades in helping eateries make more money purely from altering the presentation of their menu. In the video clip accessed from his website you see the