Skills blog

You know about ROI – return on investment, but what about ROR – return on relationship? As products and services become more and more alike your customers are no longer buying product leadership. They are buying a trusted consultant.

Do you believe in the value of what you sell? If you were asked that question I’m sure you would reply very positively. The trouble is, when we are involved with the same product or service week after week, month after month, year after year, our belief tends to become sterile.

Leadership is how you get the best from people. Personal leadership is how you get the best from yourself. What’s that phrase? If you can’t lead you, please don’t try and lead me.

Trust is fundamental to modern selling. To be a successful salesperson in today’s market you must sell not only solutions, but advice, confidence and dependability. You must be totally reliable to deal with in every respect. That’s what becoming ‘a trusted consultant’ is all about.

Selling against competition is all about selling the difference: what is so special about your product or service and what do these ‘differences’ mean to your customer? But this is relatively conventional wisdom. It poses the question – what do you do when your differentiators are elusive – when your product or service is pretty […]

Most companies have a sales team. They make calls, organise meetings, speak with prospects, and aim to hit monthly targets. And most of the time, they do fine. Sufficient guidance can be provided internally, by line managers or more experienced team members.

We recently published a longer than usual, but hopefully interesting blog which asked the question: ‘what is a good organisation?’ A difficult question to answer conclusively, but on the blog we used the stakeholder model to suggest that while a good organisation will inevitably mean different things to different people, an organisation that aims to […]

When communicating with others, whether colleagues or clients, on the job, in meetings, or on the phone, we all tend to stick to our habits. But often those habits are unhelpful. Perhaps we rarely take the opportunity to speak up and give voice to our views and opinions – finding it difficult for example to […]

Three decades of management and sales training have convinced us that there is one skill any high potential must master – become an effective presenter and speaker. Nothing, but nothing, will build your confidence more effectively.