Archives for category: Sales
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Degrees of Enjoyment

October 12, 2018 //
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Work, play. Day, night. Fun, no fun. These are pretty binary concepts, aren’t they?

I’ve always said we should find a job we enjoy, since it’s going to be occupying such a large amount of our healthy, active years, but enjoyment is hardly a binary concept.

No, it’s more of a spectrum. There are bits of our work that we enjoy more than others. The creative bits are generally more enjoyable than the humdrum bits. There are degrees of enjoyment. The most enjoyable parts of our job are not as enjoyable as our time off.Then again, being on holiday is often better than simply having time off.

If we play sport, then going to the gym is not as enjoyable as a game of footie or tennis.

I was out for an evening of 6-a-side soccer the other day, in the driving rain, and one of my pals joined the warm-up looking a bit glum. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you could be working. Playing soccer in terrible weather is always better than working. Are you telling me you’d rather be plastering right now?’

‘Yes’, he said, ‘I would.’ Like I said, degrees of enjoyment, just on a different part of the spectrum to me.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

800 Blog Posts

October 8, 2018 //
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Well, bloody hell, 800 blog posts out the door! At a total elapsed average time from idea to creation, to fine-tuning, to scheduling of half an hour per post, that’s 400 hundred hours of blogging.

It’s also 10 solid weeks of nothing but blog posting over the last 5 years, 1 month, 1 week and change. There has to be a book in it somewhere. That doesn’t mean it’s a book worth publishing or buying, and if it’s not bought is it really a book? If a tree falls in a forest and no-one hears it does it make a sound? If I signal to turn left and no-one seems my signal, has it been received, to make it a signal to someone?

When I published my 750th blog post I talked about the possibility of packing it in at post number 1,000. That’s in 200 blog posts’ time, just over 15 months away, roughly the dawn of 2020. That seems as good a time as any, like when Forest Gump had run thousands of miles and then simply stopped, because for him the time was right. Maybe I’ll keep on going after the 1000th blog post, having become institutionalised to commit my musings to digital paper.

For me the act of blogging has always been a self-centred thing, something I do for the discipline and flow of regular writing. I’ve never actively promoted the blog and the size of the readership and followership is not important to me.

For now, though, the next thought is blog post number 801. Thanks for reading!

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Barcodes

October 5, 2018 //
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Barcodes are amazing things, aren’t they? They’re the kind of things I’ll never take for granted.

Barcodes have been around for a long time, ever since we’ve had the technology to point a device at a code – or point the code-bearing item at a device – and have it translated into a specific inventory record in a company’s supply chain or retail computer system.

The fact that all the billions of things out there can each have their own unique sequence of numbers and bars makes business flow at the pace it does. You can have a code for one item, another code for a box of them, another for a case of boxes, and for all I know another code for an entire pallet of thousands of them. They enable the entire supply chain and retailer to keep a electronic record of the physical movement of an item, from creation to distribution, to consumption.

Owning the code conventions and selling the codes is, of course, big business. But they’re worth every penny or cent, in my view.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Personal Annual Goals

October 3, 2018 //
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Do you set PAGs for yourself – personal annual goals? Perhaps it sounds a bit too organised, a bit too much like work. Maybe you like to go with the flow and see where you’re at the end of the year. Maybe you don’t think of your life like that and go through it savouring every moment.

If you do like to achieve things, and see an improvement in your life and the lives of those closest to you, then PAGs are a good way of doing that. They stop time running away from you. We know from experience that plans very rarely survive the first incursion into reality, but having some high level objectives keeps us on track and focused on the here and now I think.

I know a guy who sets himself PAGs. They might be things like ‘sell house for x, clearing y profit’, ‘change car’, and ‘earn z before taxes’, those kind of things. He really values them and he’s flying through them at the moment.

I think they work well for achievable or binary things that you have control over, like selling your house for a certain amount. Where they work less well is with big hairy arse goals, or BHAGs as the business folk call them, like get your first book published – not self-published – or getting a child into a highly oversubscribed school. These have a low probably rate of success, yet they’re still binary.

Personal Annual Goals are great ways of stopping time from running away from you, that most precious of resources that you can’t ever get back. In that sense, further chopping your PAGS into half-yearly, quarterly and even personal monthly goals, PMGs, is not a bad idea either.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Reverse Entropy

September 26, 2018 //
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Entropy is a fascinating concept. It seems to be one of those underlying laws of the universe that works for work and life too.

From what I understand, the ever-expanding universe is subject to it, the tendency for things to naturally descend into a state of disorder, randomness and chaos. If you apply this principle to work and non-work, to put it crudely, it means that eventually everything goes to sh*t. Not in the literal sense of human effluent, but in the American sense of rubbishness, poorness, brokenness.

For me it rings true. On the one hand people say if it ain’t broke don’t fix, but on the other, if you don’t keep improving something and leave it to do its own thing, it will eventually break down and not work.

It also seems to me that in our work and our lives we should be engaged in a constant state of what I call ‘reverse entropy’, trying to create things, build things and fine-tune things, raging against the dying of the light, to borrow from a well-known Welsh poet.

Reverse entropy is our conscious, active way of bringing order, quality, skills and artifice to the world and what we do, from which we derive pleasure, money and nourishment.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Preparing for a Big Presentation

September 19, 2018 //
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I’m no different to anyone else when it comes to delivering ‘the big presentation’. I get nervous before I have to speak in front of a large audience. Who doesn’t? They used to say that if you weren’t nervous you didn’t care, and I think that adage still applies.

I’m not talking about the content of a big presentation in this post. I’m talking about getting into the right mindset so you do the best job you’re capable of.

I approach the psychology of a big presentation this way. I acknowledge that I’m nervous, and then I ask myself, ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen?’ However serious the ramifications are of a presentation not going well, they pale in comparison with, let’s say, our health and the health of our nearest and dearest. We sometimes fear in advance that things could go spectacularly wrong, but we always recover from these bumps in the road.

Once I’ve reminded myself that the worst that could happen is not that bad at all, I tell myself that I don’t care how the presentation goes, to take the pressure off. I’m now starting from a position of an empty box, a box empty of nervousness, and then I proceed to fill it with positive thoughts. I’m getting in the right frame of mind to deliver the best job I can. I’m getting my head in the game.

I mentally run through the order of the first few things I’m going to say, safe in the knowledge that once I get going everything will flow. I want to open with a bang, perhaps a surprise, earn the respect of the audience, and then relax knowing that I have them with me.

Sometimes someone introduces me, sometimes I’m the one speaking first, it doesn’t matter. I smile, and begin talking.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

This is Paul

September 10, 2018 //
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When my brothers and I were kids, our parents were teachers and we had a special way of answering the  house phone and dealing with phone calls.

We’d say hello. We’d never say ‘hello this is London 123456’, giving away our number, and we’d never say our name. If someone said is this 123456, we’d either say, no it’s not, what number were you looking for, or else we’d ask who they were looking for. If someone asked to speak to a person in the house, we’d ask their name before we checked if our parents or our brothers were in.

As teachers, my parent’s were ex-directory, that is to say that they chose not to list their phone number in the big book. We would occasionally get crank or abusive calls and this escalation protocol was a useful process for getting rid of them.

Nowadays, people just say hello, which is fine of course, but in business it’s not particularly helpful. This is because it forces many callers to say ‘is this Paul?’ to which we would have to say yes before the call had even started.

I used to date an American girl a long time ago. When she was at work she wouldn’t answer with hello, she’d say ‘this is Susan’. Susan wasn’t actually her name, but you get the point. I liked it. It was helpful, personal and sounded more customer focused. I adopted it immediately.

So don’t be surprised if you call me on business and I say ‘this is Paul’, or it’s even friendlier version ‘hello, this is Paul’.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Road Time

September 7, 2018 //
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Despite the advent of all things digital and web, a lot of us still do a lot of travelling, to physical meetings or events. We still spend a lot of time out of the office. That makes it hard for people to get hold of us but also hard for us to get stuff done while we’re travelling.

If we’re driving to meetings, much more so than if we’re travelling by rail or air, then this can be dead time, because the act of driving occupies so many of our faculties on a constant basis. After all, we might be guiding a one-and-a-half ton killing machine through fast motorways, narrow, winding roads roads and populated areas.

This is road time. In the car is the best time for people to reach us and for us to hold calls and get them out. The one thing we can do when we’re driving is talk. And think, it least to some degree.

If I want to do a long call or an interview with someone, I’ll ask them when they’re travelling. They’re a captive audience during their road time, they’re happy to get the call out of the way – it’s a good use of their time – and they generally have privacy, which you can’t say for train journeys.

Road time can be productive, for both the driver and the person trying to reach them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Sales

The Good Ones Want to Be Measured

August 20, 2018 //
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I realise that are two ways you could interpret the title of this blog post. I don’t mean that the good ones want to be measured in their approach, in other words, considered, careful, circumspect, even though that might be a good thing in many situations. I mean that they want to be measured, by us.

Good sales people are confident in their abilities and want to be measured. The better measured they are, as long as the system of measurement is fair, the clearer their effort is, the better they sell, the better they’re rewarded.

The less good don’t want to be measured, or want to be measured less. The less they’re measured, the more they can hide in the grey areas that are equivocal and open to interpretation, wiggle room and excuses. Same for marketers too.

If you’re hiring sales people, and you know you have a product that sells well – not that you can sell well, that other people can sell well – look for the ones that want to be tied down to targets and measurements. They’re the ones who want to see their progress, be judged accurately on their efforts, and be rewarded accordingly.

 

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Mktg Shorthand

August 15, 2018 //
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Business is awash with shorthand.

Good shorthand uses TLAs or jargon that everyone understands to save time and effort. Bad shorthand leaves people unproductive, confused and alienated.

I’ve always used ‘mktg’ as a shorthand for marketing. So much so that I use it in the domain name for my business website, M4 Marketing. It’s a nice short domain. The only problem I have is that I have to spell out the domain name over the phone, which is not ideal.

I think that the mktg shorthand is good shorthand, no? It’s like ‘mgmt’ for management. Pretty much everyone knows that shorthand and uses it freely.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales
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