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quirky

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

Price Discovery

I recently treated myself to a touch of wine-tasting. I was startled at how every Cape wine farm displays their prices. As I’ve blogged before, you should never present your prices in a way that looks like an invoice [http://salespodder.com/quote-or-early-invoice/]. For a prospect’s initial consumption

Are You In A Chain?

I heard a decent joke on Friday night courtesy of an engaging chap who owns, among other things, a huge metal bashing plant so successful that he helped to make the new seats for all but one of the stadiums S Africa is building for next year’s World Cup.

Just One Page

As I merrily helped put together a document for “Executive” consumption, I stated that a certain topic wasn’t succinct enough. Protests abounded. They had so much to say that it simply all had to be kept in. The problem I had was that the info didn’t fit onto

Boost Your Reputation

I caught a snippet the other day where a PR consultant (formerly of the UK’s Press Complaints Commission) mentioned an old adage that ‘reputation’ is based on just three things: > what you do, what you say, and what others say about you. I sense this suggests the following

The Difference You Bring

I chatted over a drink with a chap that was once at an international finance summit. Attendees included Gordon Brown, in his then capacity as the UK’s purse-string holder. He noted that in the technical detail of such forum, he posed one key question for Brown. After joking that

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