the joys(?) of cold calling
Last Thursday I blogged about a marketing company who would not stop cold calling me.
I am no stranger to cold calling; it was something that I, along with almost everyone else in sales in those days, did a lot of back in the 1970s. I did some more as recently as 2007 when trying to revive the fortunes of the business unit that I was attached to for nine months or so. Cold calling is a fact of life and it does, sometimes, work. Read more…
midweek musings on how to treat people that you’re trying to win business from
Last week I had a message that someone had called my office asking for me. They declined to give a reason for their call.
The next day they called again, and then again. I knew by now who the company was and, having looked them up on the web, knew that what they were offering was of no interest to my business, so when I got yet another message I rang them to ask them not to waste their time and money. Read more…
it began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep
It had been a long day. The client meeting at a multi occupier office complex on a business park in the North East had been the usual bloodbath, but his ruse of putting the reallocation of car parking spaces onto the agenda had ensured that all of the big guns turned up instead of sending a minion. As a result he had managed to get his budget plans agreed, but it had been well after 5pm before he got away and the drive home was a six hour run if he could make it non-stop.
The early stages had gone well; just some heavy rain as he crossed into Leicestershire, but then warnings of overnight lane closures on the motorway had seen him switch to an old favourite cross country route that followed the approximate line of an ancient Roman road. Read more…
what’s the connection between the Mona Lisa and an FM?
I had been looking at a copy of the Mona Lisa and then the next day a conversation with a facilities manager then started this train of thought off.
The Mona Lisa contains a number of visual gags and one of the joys of looking at it is to spot these details, but any good painting, or photograph, or view will have all sorts of details that make up the whole visual experience. Just as it is nice to stop and smell the roses from time to time it is also good to let the eyes wander over something and feast on the smaller elements that you’ll find. Even something familiar can yield new things when you stand back and look. Read more…
chuck out your KPIs and measure real performance
Something that crops up constantly in the line of business that I am in is measurement of performance; often it is as simple as “Did we get what we ordered?” not least in terms of my clients being satisfied with me, but it is also about service contracts where delivery can get harder to pin down. I am in the process of writing a short eBook on the subject, so let me share some of my thinking here. Read more…
Monday Musings holiday fun on travel to London
As it is a Holiday Monday I thought a little frivolity could surface and so, having been reading about the Mayoral campaign on a couple trips to London recently, it strikes me that I might make a suggestion.
One issue for both candidates seemed to be to do something about “the monolith that is Transport for London”. If so, then I ask that they axe the DffTCB; The Department for frustrating ThatConsultantBloke. I have a picture of something like this: Read more…
just how well do you communicate with modern technology?
In recent years we have begun to rely on emails, voicemail and text messages as primary methods of communication as we seek that immediacy of communication. Like me you probably know people who run more than one mobile ‘phone (maybe you do yourself?) and can’t bear to be out of touch. We seem to have developed an insatiable appetite for instant contact, but without any thought of the consequences. Read more…
midweek musings on thank you notes, and why it is wrong to solicit them
One of the things that have been doing the rounds on various blogs and social media posts for a while now is the lost art of the thank you note. Now I like to write one of these where appropriate, and I do mean write; pen and paper and my own hand, not typed.
But many of these recommendations to write thank you notes are for where you have been interviewed for a job, the suggestion being that you should always write a thank you note after the interview or you won’t get the job. Read more…
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