trendwatch

Who can forget the fanfare around Sales 2.0? Social media was the amazing mousetrap destined to make buyers hurtle irresistibly towards our selling stall. Then lately there was Industry 4.0. Not solely another flaccid WEF vibe [http://salespodder.com/industry-4-0-applied-to-your-niche/]. Which was in part similar to (or perhaps

About time. The corporate trend to scrap performance reviews gathered serious momentum this week. Yet another global behemoth chose to get rid of this vile, septic procedure. Now consultant Accenture finally realise they only reward narcissistic self-promoters [http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/the-brilliant-reason-why-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-companies-is-getting-rid-of-performance-reviews--bkB4iz0IXe] . Compounded by longtime gripes of distraction,

I tagged this post trendwatch, and then realised I don’t use that tag enough. Anyway, there’s an interesting, if unfortunately rarely inspirational, section on TechCrunch featuring ten minute video interviews; Ask a VC [http://techcrunch.com/video/ask-a-vc/]. I’ve watched almost an hour of this now and

[http://saleschallenger.exbdblogs.com/2011/02/07/are-your-salespeople-spending-too-much-time-in-front-of-customers/] An American study of over 5,000 salespeople suggests that in just a few short quarters of the last decade, face-to-face selling time fell off a cliff. A 26% drop apparently. If these end-of-’09 stats were a week’s worth of

Buried in a recent HBR piece (see the 4th page of this scribd [http://www.scribd.com/doc/49478794/The-New-Path-To-the-C-Suite-HBR] view) is this suggestion that there’s a new seat in the C-suite; for the chief commercial officer, or CCO. The shift to which they initially refer is the blurring

I spoke to an old compadre of mine that I’ve not seen for a few years the other night. I was delighted to hear his selling enthusiasm remain sky high, as he raced home to do a WebEx call with a prospect in a timezone 9 hours behind.  WebEx