August 14, 2023

You can lead a horse to water.....

August 14, 2023/ Jeff Wolfin

Does the following scenario sound familiar? Your company invests a significant amount of time, effort and money on a new sales, leadership or customer service training programme. It is launched with a certain degree of fanfare. The launch goes well – there is plenty of initial excitement and enthusiasm. However, in the end, there is little or no tangible improvement in performance and a few years later, more time, effort and money is spent on a new initiative.

Why does this happen?

May 08, 2023

How well tuned is your sales 'engine'?

May 08, 2023/ Jeff Wolfin

Organisations manage their production process to within an inch of its life - quite right too. However do they also manage the process that produces new business with quite the same precision? If we think of the sales operation as a business generation 'engine', perhaps we can identify where appropriate fine tuning could lead to significant improvements in sales.

February 20, 2023

Face-to-Face training is dead - hold the horses!

February 20, 2023/ Jeff Wolfin

Time to debunk a learning myth or two.

Here is one I hear quite a lot…. Face-to-Face training is dead. The future is all about ‘resources not courses’. Really!

Now don’t get me wrong, digital technology and tools such as Zoom and MS Teams offer great potential for the world of learning but sounding the death knell of Face-to-Face learning is way too premature.

April 18, 2022

Are deals taking too long to close? Try this test....

April 18, 2022/ Jeff Wolfin

I have lost count of the number of times organisations have told us they need to improve the ability of their salespeople to close deals. The story line is usually along the following familiar lines…Too many sales opportunities have been sitting in the 'closing' stage of the pipeline for too long - they take much longer to close than anticipated or else they simply evaporate and disappear from the pipeline altogether. The conclusion therefore often drawn is “We need to improve our closing skills”.

Not necessarily...

November 30, 2021

Is there a silent assassin destroying your business?

November 30, 2021/ Jeff Wolfin

Customer Experience is important to you. You spend large sums of money on your brand. It sets an expectation with your customers of what it will be like to buy from you. However, in most businesses there is an assassin at work – with the potential to destroy both your brand and your reputation with your customers. How many times does this assassin strike in your business every day? How often is your brand expectation undermined?

June 26, 2021

Demo's are all well and good, but...

June 26, 2021/ Jeff Wolfin

…they shouldn’t be a substitute for good selling.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a good demonstration – the secret however, is in the timing.

October 23, 2020

Do your customers like you, trust you and rate you?

October 23, 2020/ Jeff Wolfin

Years ago, I was given some very valuable advice about whether or not to go into partnership with someone. “You need to like them, trust them and rate them” was what I was told. I was also advised that it is not often that you will find all three of these conditions are met. It has proven a very valuable benchmark for me down the years. However I also think that it might be a useful yardstick for us to assess what our customers might think of us.

November 18, 2019

Sending in a proposal? Tip to avoid a common trap!

November 18, 2019/ Jeff Wolfin

Consider the following scenario….a salesperson goes to meet a prospect. The meeting goes well. There is good rapport. The salesperson learns about the prospect’s business. The prospect even shares some of their issues and an interest in finding out more about what the salesperson has to offer. All good so far. However, danger lurks! Hope is raised but often only to be dashed in the fullness of time.

September 15, 2019

Flicking the switch to sales success

September 15, 2019/ Jeff Wolfin

As has been espoused many times in these pages (and in more books than a dog could run around), a person’s mindset is a huge contributor to their success in life. How we think governs how we act and behave which in turn, govern the results we achieve.

It therefore follows that if we can identify and flick the right mindset ‘switch’, it can have enormously positive knock-on benefits to our success.

January 26, 2019

CRM - What's in it for me?

January 26, 2019/ Jeff Wolfin

Management information is the lifeblood of any organisation. How much are we going to sell? When are we going to sell it? How confident are you that we’ll get the deal? What are the obstacles? Are we speaking to the right people? What’s your next action? (And so on). If managers knew the answers to these and other fundamental questions and the answers were accurate, running the business would be so much easier – and profitable.

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