Salespeople as Parents – prescription for failed sales
Have you ever spoken to a sales person & felt they were treating you like an idiot? We, as sales people, tend to have these types of conversations when we’re trying to close a sale, even if we...
View ArticleCold calling with dignity (yours and the prospect’s)
I had to do some cold calling today, so naturally I worked from Jeff Thull’s script. It’s simply the best approach I know to keep the dignity of the customer intact while you’re interrupting them with...
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Effective negotiation sometimes means staying with it even after you’ve lost
Negotiating skill is partly personality, mostly hard-won experience. There are a few good books on the subject (I’ve found “Game, Set, Match: Winning The Negotiations Game,” by Henry Kramer pretty...
View ArticleWhen things get tough, you need to negotiate face-to-face
There is a moment early in the movie “Local Hero” where MacIntyre, the executive who is being dispatched to Scotland to negotiate a land purchase for an oil company, complains to a colleague about the...
View ArticleFollow-up gets results
If you follow this space, you know I talk about books occasionally. Some PR folks have noticed, and now they send me books from time to time which they would like me to talk about. This has led to the...
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Ultra-competitve mindset costs dealmakers
Deepak Malhotra (co-author of “Negotiation Genius,” one of last year’s top 5 books) and colleagues have once again dived into the psychology of negotiators and dealmakers in May’s Harvard Business...
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"Marketing Metaphoria"–the deep yearnings behind the products we buy
Father-and-son team Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of “Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers,” assert that beneath our purchasing decisions lie deep,...
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The deep attraction of the locally-produced
While reading a review of Rob Walker’s “Buying In,” in today’s New York Times Book Review, I got to thinking about why I buy a certain type of beer. The review points out Walker’s description of the...
View ArticleBuyer’s hubris harms revenue growth from acquisitions
Accenture recently released a report entitled “Leveraging Sales & Marketing to Maximize the Value of Mergers and Acquisitions.” This report quantifies what many people have felt about M&A—as...
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