Topic

quirky

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

Don't Be Afraid Of Going In High

Had an awesome reminder today of the vagaries of pricing policies. I was buying for a change, some sms-cum-bluetooth advertising stuff as it happens for a consumer venture of mine. The technical service providers and I were discussing how much to pitch the text message at. You’ll have seen

Sales Idol

Of interest to anyone in the UK that sells, would you believe it, there’s now a pop-idol-meets-big-brother-cum-survivor-stroke-apprentice style reality tv show for us in the offing. Under the snappy headline Commission Impossible [http://www.closethedeal.co.uk/], there’s an application form to fill in to help get whittled

Smoking Out The Anti-Capitalists

Discussing the merits of running a ‘lifestyle business’ over the weekend, when you know you could make more money working for yourself alone, reminded me of a conversation I had earlier this year. After a thoroughly enjoyable lunch in glorious 36° sunshine in Cape Town’s Northern Suburbs, a good

Ride The 'New Wave'

Recently I’ve come across a spate of sales teams whose leadership is exasperated by the lack of extra sales key new product launches have brought in. It’s a long-known problem, classically referred to as “sales substitution”. This has two strands, the one I’ll deal with here typically

Buying on Price? Then prepare to pay twice….

Things often happen in 3s don’t they? At customers & prospects this very week, I’ve come across three separate instances of the same thing. (I wrote about one in detail [http://salespodder.com/can-you-match-that-price/] just a couple of days ago) In each case, sales people have yelped in

Recognising Showstoppers

I have a friend selling from his recently adopted New York base data mining kit for sales people. He’s been peddling this kind of stuff (aka ‘BI’ for the tekkies out there) since 99. He’s sold oodles of it in the meantime, and learned a fair bit about

Accent on Success in US

I did something my generation probably consider a bit nerdy in some rain-induced spare time over the weekend, although kids and non-Brits probably don’t get such hang-ups. I got involved in a forum discussing why it was that the English accent is apparently so successful when cold-caling in America.

New Sales Manager Turnaround, Blair-stylee

So Tony B-Liar finally ended his tenure of Number Ten. Paxo hosted a Newsnight Blairathon to assess his ‘legacy’. Unfortunately it included Alistair Campbell, which made me wonder how many of Newsnight’s 1½m loyal devotees view him as one of Britain’s most odious men, but at least

The Dignity Of Labour

Surprisingly not a reference to experimental Human League 1980ish singles pre-Dare, rather seeing how the libertarian inspiration of Charles Murray [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(author)] should enthuse sales people that don’t want to pick up the phone to take action. I saw an interview with former

Finding People That Will Buy 'New'

Came across the Global Entrepreneurial Monitor [http://www.gemconsortium.org/] through Newsnight [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/default.stm], with a researcher pointing out why UK had some way to go in fostering dynamism in this sector. A couple of the stats made me think about