Holiday reading, staying in a friend’s lovely home in the green mountains north of Barcelona, Spain, I’d finished the crappy novel and trashy magazines I’d bought at the airport on the way out. What next for my idle mind while the kids were splashing in the pool? I was ‘mooching’ in the library, and I…
I was a loyal Napster fan- I subscribed for 4 years, and then I saw a press advert for a new offer that was £3 per month cheaper than my rate. I rang up and tried to sign up. I couldn’t. I spoke, at length, customer services person and after much frustrating chatter, the guy…
But if you want to get more of it it’d be pretty useful to have an idea of what people with great personal impact actually do, wouldn’t it? Well here, without varnish, is the answer to that question from my personal and professional point of view. People with great personal impact have- Energy- in the…
Because they talk about their products and services from the wrong perspective. Inexperienced ‘sales’ people have an unfortunate tendency to talk from ‘inside to out’, rather than from the customer’s perspective in. Often the pitcher will start by describing their product and how it works before they get on to what it will do for…
Sometimes it’s much easier to pitch with almost no hope of actually winning because you can be. Er… honest. I was involved in a pitch a couple of years ago, right at the hard start of the bad times, where we were asked to take part in the process as an afterthought, to make up…
I read an article a few years ago about travelling preachers in 19th Century America. There were hundreds of the faithful fellows, literally wandering from town to town, all through the thousands of empty miles of the mid-west. They made their living, or their dinner, by being good, because they knew that if they weren’t…
I’d always be very nervous when one of your team bounces into your office at the gloomiest of times and says, ‘There’s a £4 million opportunity at Lapsang Souchong Ltd, we ought to go for it…’
He’s a great guy, Rodrigo. He’s a senior exec in a very successful European company. We’ve worked with him for a couple of years and done some good stuff, we’ve earned a place at his table, if you like. Rod’s a demanding, reliable and honest business contact and friend. So we were over in his city…
Dinosaurs died out a few million years ago didn’t they? Why? Because they didn’t know what was coming and had no defence against the cold. How many dinosaurs in our business are dying from the cold right now? Millions I’d guess. Leviathans with fancy offices in London, New York, Paris Munich… (everybody’s talking ’bout….),…