quirky

I think every salesperson goes through this rite of passage.  You’re told that you are going to win a deal by the prospect.  You proudly, maybe even smugly, pass on the good news to your boss, your peers, your support staff, your spouse, your pet.  Then what?  Jupiter mis-aligns

Here’s a quote I read whilst surfing in front of the telly waiting for the Champions League game to start.  It’s from a woman that married a man 11-years her senior with an insufferable reputation for social ineptitude.  And then had four children with him over the next

A pal of mine used to be a buyer (I know, how could I…) and I was asking him his thoughts on what people might think in terms of a buying process for a product of mine. As we chatted, he revealed his pet hate with reps.  He’d often

Over lunchtime earlier today I caught itinerant self-publicist and seemingly self-styled ‘entrepreneur’s entrepreneur’, Richard Branson, plugging his latest book on a radio show.  And in these credit crunch selling-squeeze times, I was reminded of a wonderful piece of advice I was given at the start of my sales career

A friend was telling me about his sales benchmarking sideline.  He offers clients a full competitive audit of their sales process, right through from initial enquiry to cancellation/returns.  He’d recently conducted some work in the vaguely entitled ‘virtual assistant’ space. 16 firms were contacted.  Just 5 emailed a

Two separate experiences have reminded me of the difficulties that surround not just engaging an audience, but of actually maintaining their interest.  In one paper this morning, a “communications consultant” trots advice [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4799417.ece] out for Gordon Brown.  As one of the

Over the past week the physicists on the Franco-Swiss border have achieved remarkable global media coverage.  The CERN labs, most famous it seems for giving us the internet, have just switched on their latest supergizmo.  When I first heard of it, I’m pretty sure its raison d’etre was

Escaping the rain from the second Summer in a row to be a washout in London yesterday, I read an article in one of those supplement sections of newspapers aimed, I think, at people with more time on their hands than they deserve. As my heated panini did its trick,