Wandering through a London rail terminus bookshop I was visually walloped by a huge planagram for a series of books that herald themselves as ‘brilliant’.

Suspecting coyness not to be an issue, I knowingly thumbed for a few minutes through one called Brilliant Presentation. It’s written by Richard Hall.

His recommended approach was instantly proposed via the mnemonic Fires:

fresh informative relevant enthusiastic story

The link above provides more meat, and although not directly referencing these points, does seem to serve as a neat idea trigger for those new to presenting.

This is one area that usually suffers from overkill. The best advice for anyone preparing a presentation is typically to imagine what you’d do if you only had a single slide - one image, one number, say - and pare it down as much as you can.

Watching the enthralling end-of-season tennis Masters, in London for the next five years, it was interesting to hear Boris Becker’s uncomplicated take on life.

When asked how Andy Murray could raise his game to win a match, he replied that in such circumstances people can often try too many things. This causes distraction and lack of focus. Both combine to prevent the sought after success. The remedy, he recommended was to just:

“simplify your game”

Remember what works best for you, and stick to doing just that.

Of all the websites that regularly feature in the world’s most visited lists, can any be more frustrating than the BBC’s?

Its News (& associated Sport) output is not only such a missed opportunity, but also contributes to the dumbing down of information more than any other source. Bereft of comment and context, shorn of bite and sting, each time I logon I feel disappointment with myself for wasting that precious time on there.

During one such distraction, I clicked through an item written by an editor on how they were tweaking their site. His main point was that headlines were, in the main, written to suit two platforms; the web and Ceefax (the text service through the telly). The technical restrictions of the latter meant that all headlines had to be between 31 and 33 characters in length.

My interest was further tickled when he went on to almost apologise for this, yet justified it by adding that it seemed any story could be summed up in such constraints.

Any news item? Summed up in only 31-33 characters? I re-checked the site. And to my amazement, I found that it was actually quite unnecessary to click on any headline, as each one really did give all the gist you needed to know.

Anyone writing bullets, or headings, or presentation slides would do well to heed this message. Even with today’s Twitter-induced brevity, why stumble along for even 140 characters, when your point could well be made in just 33?

I’ve blogged on this idea before, and as it’s one that I’m minded to view favourably, I thought I’d spend a couple of hours of downtime reading through the associated blog.  It began 25 March 2008 in support of the book’s promotion.

Their ‘nudge’ that I’ve read referenced the most (and a damning indictment of where our 24-hour rolling news culture bereft of context or comment obsessed with celebrity and sensationalising of ‘crises’) concerns the fly painted in urinals at Schipol airport.  This move dramatically cut ’spillage’ (by 80%) and provided benefits such as lower cleaning costs and better hygiene/safety.  Here’s what I think are the dozen most mind-catching selling stimulants that I took from their first year of behavioural economics blogging:

1. Most people avoid being seen as first in to something, so think about how you can ‘nudge’ them into following suit (coins already in tip jars at start of the day and even wine bottles pre-opened at parties for instance).  How to generate testimonials for the very latest products is one obvious b2b impact.
2. Buyers will prefer to “take a small reward now over a larger reward in the future”
3. “If you keep telling people from above ‘you must be more energy efficient’ not much happens. If you put the typical electricity bill for a house like theirs in a neighbourhood like theirs, it transforms their behaviour.” Implications for sellers are clear.   Rather than make ever-more outlandish claims for the financial returns your products unleash, pick a process that you improve, and document the difference in output between people with your help, and those without.
4. How can you obscure your “reference price”?  Namely the price against which people would calculate your value for money (which is apparently why cinema foyers have such unusual serving sizes so that you don’t know if it represents VFM and buy anyway).
5. A pair of tips on what makes a successful rep; “Optimistic sales agents … significantly outsell pessimistic ones”, and when you know you avoid an essential yet unappetising task (cold-calling springs to mind) deploy a “loss aversion” “commitment strategy”.  A cool example of the latter was someone writing a big red ‘X’ for each day they performed the task, then becoming dependent on  not ‘breaking the chain’.
6. Be wary that ”increasing choices can turn people off, leading them to opt-out of the decision making process. (For retailers, this phenomenon means lower sales and profits.)”
7. It’s worth sharing with anyone stalling on a decision that “Procrastinators tend to be more miserable, less wealthy, and less healthy than those people who don’t dilly-dally”!
8. You’ll discount less if your prices do not end in a round number in the hundreds, or worse, in the thousands.
9. Brilliant insight into where to influence buyer decision making in teams: “A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member”.  The four reasons being; “predeliberation errors … are amplified”, initial speaker thoughts merely cascade throughout unchecked, group polarisation leads to more extreme views beyond predeliberation judgments, and “shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know”.
10. What self-initiated mistake most irritates your customers?  Can you ‘nudge’ them to avoid falling foul?  For instance, Lufthansa developed transparent seat pockets so that flyers would not leave treasured belongings behind.
11. “Put your prompt near a decision point”: use of stairs over the escalator rose 200% when the sign was next to them, but how many people remember go to the gym when the post-it note is on their fridge?
12. Understand two barriers to buyers acknowledging they can go ahead; that “mental accounting” limits on what is/can be spent might need to be broken, and debilitating change- or inattention-blindness must be brought to their notice.

Unfortunately, I find that disparaging views on Roadshows in solution selling prevail. They are seen as events that suck in a lot of a salesperson’s precious time only to yield very little return in the way of quality leads. And anyway, shouldn’t they be a function of marketing alone?

Even in sales teams that have the largest of marketing departmental support, negativity surrounding such activity abounds.

I do accept that in (the majority, surely?) of instances where the salesperson takes this on as their own initiative, the workload can appear disproportionately large for a limited reward, yet they are marvellous chances to shine and shore up the future pipeline.

One example that I was party to in the middle of the decade featured the world of plastic building materials. One chap called Laurence, with a South London patch centred around a Croydon depot, took on with ardour holding an Open Day. Most of the other twenty-or-so in the team thought he was nuts.

Yet he generated brand new revenue of around £150k. And when you consider it was mostly run-rate business that flowed, he ensured smashing his numbers and tasty commission. Astonishingly, only one of his colleagues attempted to replicate his feat…

Possibly my favourite steakhouse in Cape Town is on a road where, in the middle of a residential area, six restaurants incongruously sit side-by-side. Last time there I noted that on the 28th they combine to spearhead their latest annual street carnival. Not only can you taste mini-sized portions from each, but they’ve managed to gather together over fifty other firms to have stalls along the strip.

This kind of festival thinking is becoming well-established in the provincial area. It seems that every week, another outlying town or city suburb holds its own shindig.

And if the experience of my local steakhouse proprietor is anything to go by, they all find it a worthwhile enterprise.

So maybe that’s the answer to the open day workload conundrum. Share the burden. Who also sells to your customers? How else can you tempt your target market to leave their office? What can be gained from considering their overall process that’ll make you different?

I encountered an irritating reminder of just how difficult it can be to shake off misleading advice when it’s been hard-wired since early training in my fresh-faced selling days.

It struck me as though the way selling was taught in the late 80s and early 90s, you should always be testing buyer commitment. Don’t be afraid to ask the tricky question.  Close early, close often.  If you don’t ask, you don’t get.  I think you get the picture.

The idea is that objections are good things, a positive buying signal almost, so don’t be afraid to run into them.  Indeed, why not encourage them.  So if your close is not (yet) accepted, then well done for uncovering the obstacle and now simply handle it with aplomb.

Yet a recent personal experience reveals this as flawed logic.  It all stemmed from the straightforward (and not uncommon) request for someone to alter a date.

When the not unreasonable poser of ‘can we change the date to…’ was not met with the agreement expected, objections arose, the conversational flow was disrupted and a slight sense of unease descended.

In an instant I realised my mistake.  Why oh why had I not thought to see how the land lay first?  Where was my testing of the waters?  What was I doing being so assumptive in this case?  Better approaches immediately sprang to mind:

How flexible is that date?

Which other slots could also work?

What alternative times might suit you?

Hindsight.  What a killer.

A pal of mine is a purchasing expert. I know. How could I possibly cavort with the enemy and even more amazingly, he was once a rep.

We chatted about what people involved in a particular project I was working on (helping to ensure sales of cotton-related products) could do to create a more resilient supply chain. This was especially pertinent as demand outstrips supply, thus raising the power of input suppliers.

I noted that many of the elements he talked about could be readily adapted for a kind of wholesale environment. Here’s a brief list that could well trigger ideas for ways in which anyone selling can tie-in their customers closer:

• Consignment stock
• Bar code labelling
• Utilising customer stock reference numbers over manufacture references
• Blending supplier with customer system and processes
• Single monthly invoicing
• Rebate rewards
• Invoice settlement benefit
• Purchase card pre-authorised expenditure
• Project pricing/invoicing
• Contractor packs
• Mod kits
• Pre-assemblies

Everyone knows that a sell-and-run merchant will get found out one day. All buyers absolutely loath such a salesperson.

A plant involved in the cotton industry shared a tale with me about how they are trying to repair a relationship caused by just such unwelcome behaviour.

A long-term vendor-consumer arrangement was on-going. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the first flush of youth, and discord emerged over a certain product’s pricing. As a result, a particular product had gone unsold and undelivered for quite some time.

Frustrated, the seller invoked a contractual clause that meant that the customer simply had to take it. The buyer reluctantly agreed. But when the bill duly arrived after an eventually renewed supply, the seller had put on an amount for an extra third of what was actually delivered.

The customer couldn’t believe it. Any chance of relationship rescue was on the rocks. Short-term supposed gain had been sought at the sacrifice of sustainable business.

Not only that, but word soon spreads. Only a small handful of possible clients exist in the market, and their view is likely to be similarly clouded to that of the original customer. This makes remedy even more troublesome.

A short-term punch always, always, loses in the end.

A friend of mine went surfing for insight into the often murky world of Angel Investors. Apparently, there are over 300,000 such individuals in America alone, and according to the same site that stated that fact, there are three Angel-related “Bitter Truths”.

1. More than 80% of all businesses are failing to secure investor funding
2. In many cases, a business plan is rejected within 2 minutes
3. A lot of investment opportunities are far better than the business plan outlines

Hold a mirror up to these, and you could say that these hold true for many a solution sales pitch, especially when adapting the line underneath which reads “don’t let your business plan scare away investors”!

They aim to provide a soothing remedy. It announces itself in the form of a how-to guide site. If this is your kind of thing, then there maybe some tips you can pick up for your initial pitches from their (at my time of blogging) 25 free-to-view articles.

I breakfasted recently overlooking Cape Town’s semi-final venue for next year’s World Cup. The white elephant stadium looks suitably impressive. Also of note is the official utterance that it will be complete by mid-December. Lamentably, the surrounding infrastructure surely cannot boast anything like this similar tournament preceding assurance.

In the cafe, I picked up a local magazine called Sales Guru. This intrigued me as, apart from America’s Selling Power, such publications seem doomed to an ephemeral existence.

I fear the same fate awaits this endeavour as judged by the fact that none of the articles feature “real” stories, and are more geared towards the musings of various industry sages.

The accompanying blog (at my time of blogging) has 37 posts of similar disposition.

That isn’t to say some of the writing is without merit. And of course, I warmly applaud the enterprise. Yet I did yearn for more meat.

I enjoyed the reference to Keith Ferrazzi’s tips for ‘flawless follow-up‘. One of the earliest tricks I learned was that you must follow-up after a meeting as soon as possible. I fondly recall the days before ubiquitous broadband where all my team had to meet up at the end of the day in our West London office to fire off letters to people seen earlier that day by the last postbox collection. Then we’d usually head off to the pub. We definitely won deals because of this approach as it truly did leave the competition standing.  This list will make you shudder at the memory of the last time you dropped from this standard.

I also liked to see independent research on what customers want from their account management. Credited to a Mobility 2009 Conference, of the five desires tested, product/service guarantees were bottom:

85% availability
70% regular communication
69% order fulfillment
56% sales support
53% product/service guarantees

And finally, the level of frustrating surface-scratching can be seen with their 4-point plan on how to properly prepare for negotiation. It would be great as a summary box inside a description of a real-life scenario or salesteam approach:

1. know your deal/no-deal positions
2. have red herrings that you can give away for the other side’s easy wins
3. leave your emotions at the door
4. act unsure