quirky

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,

I’ve been steadily refining my cold-call pitch, as I spend a couple of hours a day, three days a week, on my mini-project to sell my new service to companies that are not existing clients. I got to thinking what happened almost everytime I arrived at a first meeting

It’s Google’s tenth birthday and all the broadsheets carry features on their game-changing rise to dominance.  I remember stumbling across them the month of launch through a tiny article in a mag called Internet Magazine.  I instantly made them my homepage.  I marvelled at how someone had so

Working as I am kind of part-time on my new product’s sales initiative is not of course ideal.  I experience frequent and deep guilt that I am not able to devote more time and effort to make my new endeavour the roaring success of my dreams.  Yet one area

As you may know, I’m currently running a small project to attract customers for a fabulous new product I’ve developed from beyond my current client base.  This involves me dedicating at least an hour a day, three days a week to cold-calling my select list of 50ish initial

Interestingly when I held a chat at one of my customers about ‘credit crunch’ busting sales tactics, I mentioned that one way was to raise a cheeky price here and there.  There’s I guess a pretty famous marketing blog [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/] by a fella called Seth Godin