Archives for category: Sales
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

A Cutting Edge

April 28, 2017 //
0

The other day I posted on Facebook a sentence lifted from a BBC sports report into a match featuring the professional soccer team I follow. The post went like this:

‘Story of the season, in fact story of most teams I’ve followed, ever: “Wolves were competitive throughout but lacked a cutting edge.”

A cutting edge is a wonderfully graphic phrase which has been so over-borrowed over the last decade that it now risks becoming a sporting cliche, along with ‘we’re taking it one game at a time,’ and many, many others.

It occurred to me at the time, and it still resonates with me now, which is why I’m telling you about it, that having a cutting edge is a vital requirement in so much of our working lives, especially in business. It’s no use being competitive if we lack a cutting edge. In other words, if we’re not executing on our plan, if we’re not getting it done.

I’m not talking about the kind of cutting edge or leading/bleeding edge you hear trotted out with technology companies. We’re on the cutting edge of nanotechnology. Purlease. Indeed, in that context it’s another phrase so well-worm as to be threadbare.

Lacking a cutting edge in sports and business means we’re not sharp, we’re blunt, unsophisticated, ham-fisted even.

So what gives you a cutting edge? Focus, practice, skill, anticipation, commitment and timing. These factors combine to allow you to capitalise, not capitulate, on opportunities.

 

 

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Deloading

April 17, 2017 //
0

I came across a new word the other day, courtesy of a link from a friend of mine that I also am lucky to work with occasionally. It’s called deloading. It’s taking proper down-time to recharge the batteries and ensure that when you get back on the horse you’re still super-productive.

The link is here. It’s written by a chap called Tim Ferriss, who many of you will know as the author of the 4-Hour Work Week, and other books on a similar theme. I thought he was a good bit older than he is. Not that he looks older, but that he seems to have packed an annoyingly large amount of stuff into his CV already.

You might know from my own blog that I’ve been an advocate of deloading for a long time, although I can honestly say I’ve never referred to it by that term. I guess I’ve always been practising the exercise of taking regular breaks, but not time-wasting breaks, from more run-of-the-mill activities like writing, work or study.

I guess you could boil it down to the time-honoured phrase that a change is as good as a rest. There is so much to be said for the productivity benefits of taking regular time out. It seems counter-intuitive that you can get more done in less and with less. Perhaps that’s the reason why many employers and managers are keen to get as much work time from their people as possible. But’s never been about the hours you put into work, it’s about the work you put into the hours.

Tags , , ,
Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Finish!

April 14, 2017 //
0

How many new things, initiatives, projects, behaviours have you started and abandoned? How many worthy departures without a destination?

All of us have things we started and didn’t get finished. We left it and it went to waste, or it became overgrown or out of date and we couldn’t re-use, regenerate or recycle it.

We might have learned something, and that’s good, but we’ve lost something too. Time, for sure, our nerve maybe, something else.

There’s a cure for this. Finish! Finish something! Get it done! Start small, with a small project you know you can complete if you re-prioritise and apply yourself. Then finish something else small, then something else after that.

Get that finishing feeling. Be a finisher, a closer.

Winners don’t always finish first, but they do finish.

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Overselling vs Underselling

April 12, 2017 //
0

Are you an overseller or an underseller? Is your default position overselling or underselling? I’m talking about either in a sales or a non-sales environment.

I’m generalising now, but I find that business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions are generally overselling.

‘Your table will be ready in a few minutes.’

‘I’ll have that fixed for you in a couple of moments.’

‘She should be back to you in a day or 2.’

It’s vague, intimate, approximate, and unreliable. The stakes aren’t too high, that’s why.

Business-to-business (B2B), however, is different, or should be. You want to under-promise, and undersell, so that you can overdeliver, and delight, your much-higher-stakes customer.

You find people are oversellers and undersellers too. Me, I’m always trying to be underselling. I try not to overpromise. I try to deliver early. I try to deliver more. Other people are not undersellers:

‘I’ll be back to the car in a couple of minutes.’

‘I’ll meet you there at midday.’

I’ll have it for you tomorrow.’

If you sell the dream, and the dream doesn’t appear when it should, you create disappointment, a phantom version of what you promised. When you let someone down, even in a microscopically small way, you create a microscopically small phantom.

The question is: do you care?

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Get Into It

April 3, 2017 //
0

Most of us procrastinate to some degree. Whether it’s a big work project, a domestic chore or a niggling thing we need to get done, we find reasons to put it off.

We’ll start it at the top of the hour, we tell ourselves, or maybe the next day, because we won’t get it done today, even though we often don’t know how long it will take. That new fitness, diet or health regime, we’ll get that rolling Monday, or perhaps the first of the month. You know, make a clean start and all that.

And then that imposed deadline comes and goes and the tiny little switch that blocks out the feeling of serenity kicks in.

I think I know the antidote to procrastination. Get into it. Just get into it!

Once you get into it, you’re fine. You’re always fine. It’s usually not as bad or as time-consuming as you imagined it would be. Thinking about the thing grew in your head until it was bigger than the thing itself.

Make a start. Get into it. Dip in and see what’s involved, see what bits you can break off and get done. And then you’re away.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Semi State Stuffiness

March 31, 2017 //
0

Try as it might, the public sector struggles to shrug off that kind of stuffiness, that misplaced and outmoded sense of entitlement and dogma that pervades the administration of the local and national body politic.

Even those sections of the public sector, the NGOs and the semi states as they call them in Ireland, which are more enterprise- and business-oriented than the others, stand out for the wrong reasons. Despite their remit to be business- and entrepreneur-focused, they’re still tied to their bureaucracy and exude a sort of semi state stuffiness that masquerades as public accountability but which is really a difficulty with change.

Take emails for instance. Trivial and everyday though they are, emails have replaced much of our daily communications and interactions and so they’re critically important for establishing rapport and sending the right messages – literally or figuratively – and picking up on the right cues.

The vast majority of emails come into your inbox from ‘first name’ or first name second name’, because that’s who they are and that’s the way the IT admin or the people themselves have set them up. Yet I frequently get emails from public sector bodies and people in the format ‘Second name comma first name.’

What kind of a name is Smith, John? Its nobody’s name. I doubt John Smith has ever been referred to as Smith, John, except in his public sector work email.

That’s the way it was set up, and that’s the way it comes across. Formal, bureaucratic, out of date, stuffy. It sends out the wrong signals.

Tags
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Selling Ciggies

March 20, 2017 //
0

I don’t know too much about business-to-consumer products sales and marketing, except as a lifelong consumer of them myself. I’ve also never smoked. I took a look at a cigarette box the other day, as I hadn’t seen one up close for a while.

It’s an odd existence marketing and selling cigarettes isn’t it? Even if you smoke them yourself. Working for a cigarette manufacturer must  feel like being a social pariah.

The packaging on fast-moving consumer goods is one of the traditional 4 P’s of marketing, along with product, price and promotion. Yet when you look at cigarette packaging, everything on there is advising you not to buy it. The cigarettes are also behind the shop counter hidden in a cupboard where you can’t even peruse the packaging.

You can’t advertise them through most media, thanks to the regulations of elected government officials, a good proportion of whom must be smokers too. If you work for a cigarette manufacturer you can’t get life insurance benefits or an occupational pension, so the manufacturer has to provide its own.

It’s flippin’ expensive too, at least if you pay your country’s duty on them.

Against all of this, people still buy a lot of cigarettes. Why is that? For one thing, cigarette smoking is still portrayed as being cool in TV and film, almost something to be aspired to.

Front and centre, of course, is the obvious physiological pull of the nicotine, as well as the behavioural comfort that comes with smoking too.

Without those addictive and behavioural factors, I wonder how successfully other things would sell if this amount of sales and marketing restraints were placed on it.

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Why The Corner Shop Will Never Die

March 15, 2017 //
0

We’ve all heard the horror stories and domesday predictions about the death of the High Street, as shoppers move out of town to the malls, or into their homes to their computer, or right where they are via their mobile phones, tablets, phablets and any other form factor you can imagine. Except that is, the move away from the quaint corner shop.

In Europe we still have corner shops, loads of them.

The corner shop I’m thinking of is in the small town I live in (a village by England standards). It’s not quite on the corner, but it’s next to 2 public houses, as you would expect in Ireland. It’s a health food shop. Ironic, given its location, but there you are.

Now if we’re in the very big city we can go onto a colossal online marketplace and get the thing we need delivered within an hour, for a premium, or the next day for probably next-to-nothing extra. But most of us aren’t in the very big city.

My wife asked me to pick up something for her during my lunch break the other day, since I was doing a couple of other errands. She was in a city and the vast supermarket she visited didn’t have said item. I went into the health food store and asked for the item. It has quite a long title to it, but even before I’d finished articulating its name the lady had pulled it from the shelf next to her till and it was ready for purchase. I was out in 120 seconds, the amount of time it takes to properly pour a pint of the black stuff.

This why the corner shop will never die. They are often specialist providers. You can always find staff to ask something. They can give you a knowledgeable and immediate answer the vast majority of the time. They usually smile and are grateful for your business. And, you are done in a matter of minutes.

In certain circumstances, then, the corner shop is alive and well and still a great retail experience.

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Sales, Strategy

The Seller’s Cooling Off Notice

March 13, 2017 //
2

To protect the buyer, and give them a little more comfort behind the fairly toothless ‘caveat emptor’, it’s customary for the buyer to have a cooling off notice, or period, usually of 14 days.

Common in industries like financial services, it’s the 2 weeks’ grace during which we can consider our purchase, read the small print if we’re interested, and duck out of the contract if we felt unduly pressured into the sale.

The other day I was negotiating new mobile telephony contracts for my wife and I. This involved us upgrading both our package and our devices. I wanted to insure our swanky new devices – well, they are new devices and new to us, but not the latest models, as we’re perfectly happy being a release or 2 behind the bleeding edge – and was surprised to know that even though the start date of the insurance was day 1, I wasn’t covered and so wouldn’t be able to make any claim until day 15.

This is effectively the seller’s cooling off notice. It was also a major inconvenience to me as I was about to go on an international trip and didn’t want to make it, uninsured, with my new phone. I left the new phone at home.

The seller’s cooling off notice is the caveat vendor to our caveat emptor, but with more teeth I think.

Tags ,
Categories Customers, Sales

Subject Line Signposting

March 8, 2017 //
0

Subject line signposting is the most decent thing we can do as communicators. It’s a pull thing. You pull interested parties to you rather than pushing stuff to them – or rather at them.

We should do it with all our emails, tweets and advertising. I hope I do it with my blog posts.

With a good subject line you pique the interest of your audience while still signposting them to either read on or move away. After all, what’s the point of encouraging an audience with a poor fit through intrigue or duplicity?

Subject line signposting saves everyone’s time, yours and theirs. After all, we don’t want to be labelled time-wasters.

 

Tags
Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »