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quirky

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

Sales Bosses Top 5 Dangers

What are the top dangers sales operations face today? According to 2,663 such organisations polled recently, they are these 5: 1. Poorly defined sales process 2. Individual skill shortages 3. Unfocussed sales activity 4. Self-limiting belief prevails 5. Management not nurturing I see all of the above inside the

Going over their head

This is such an age-old problem, yet I cannot recall ever speaking to someone who had a genuine answer to it. The scenario is, you’re selling to one person and things are not necessarily going your way. So you must talk to their boss. What do you do? a)

G8 ‘Special Relationship’ Evaluation

Political anoraks will no doubt be into the annual meeting between the world’s self-styled 7 most important leaders and Russia, currently taking place this year in Germany. The British Fourth Estate have been giving it blanket coverage, what with climate change policy vital and Putin playing up. One such

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 [https://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.