Thursday 7 January 2010

Cable London

This is me, Terry Hannell and Sean Quigley after we beat three other Cable Companies to win a quiz on the Family Channel. Thats Cheggers handing the cheque over.

Look at the faces of the losers in the background lololol...Gutted!

Seriously...


Some doors a salesman should never knock...

10 Things to remember about Cold-Calling

1. SHUT UP AND LISTEN MORE TO YOUR PROSPECT - It's really amazing how much you canlearn from prospects by just letting them do all the talking. Here’s a clue: The letters in the word LISTEN also spell the word SILENT.
2. STOP CALLING LOW-LEVEL EXECUTIVES - Start at the top of the food chain and makeyour first contact with the Business Owner! As they say in the Guggenheim Museum...Start At The Top. Your top level prospect will chime in with ‘Actually you should talk to (someone) who heads up my marketing here’. You have a choice. You can always call them on it and say, ‘Hold on, he will only refer it back to you. YOU are the one who can cut through the red tape and make this happen’. Or you could say, ‘thanks, can you transfer me?’ and then tell this Marketing guy that his boss recommends He talks to YOU!
3. CONTACT PROSPECTS THAT SAID NO TO YOU SIX MONTHS AGO! Remember, all prospect decisions are not set in stone. Also the person who told you no may have moved on, died or come to their senses. They said NO in a situation that was ‘then’. This is ‘now!’
4. IF YOU DON"T DO ANY RESEARCH ON YOUR PROSPECT PRIOR TO PICKING UP THE TELEPHONE THEN YOU'RE STUPID. At least take a minute or two and do some homework. The moreeffort you make when researching your prospect then the more effort your prospect will make to speak with you on the telephone. Don’t do too much. You don’t need to be an expert on what they do. That’s their job. Be an expert on what you do and let them tell you how great they are.
5. NEVER EVER GIVE UP AFTER THE FIRST, SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH AND FIFTH CONTACT! Keep calling your prospect till they say NO. Don’t hang up unless they either buy or die. You would be amazed at how close people are to a yes when they give up.
6. BE ENTHUSIASTIC - HAVE SOME PERSONALITY ON THE TELEPHONE. If you're not excitingto speak with on the telephone than how can you expect your prospect to even give you a millisecond of their time? You have to believe in yourself and your product and convey that over the phone. If you sound like you don’t care, they will assume you don’t care and guess what...neither will they!
7. PAUSE LIKE A BROKEN CLOCK - Pausing after your prospect's name and while your interacting with your prospects lets your prospect know they're important. It lets them know that you have a genuine interest in them. Pausing is a powerful sales tool. Most people find silence uncomfortable. You need to learn to embrace silence. When you ask for the money, STFU! That stands for Shut The Fuck Up. The first one to speak loses. My record on the phone is 3:27 minutes. Face to face? 12:47 minutes.
8. KNOW YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE LIKE YOU KNOW HOW TO WALK. The more you know about what you sell helps to create an atmosphere of consultative selling rather than product or service pushing. People buy from confident people. If you are confident about your business then you will convey that. People feel safe if they are spending money with someone who is confident. That said, don’t bluff if you don’t know the answer to something. Say so and tell them you will find out. They will like that. Not only because you will appear confident but also because you want to make sure that have the right information and you recognise that the point is important to them.
9. FOLLOW UP WITH YOUR PROSPECTS. Most sales are lost because you don't go the distanceto follow up with your prospect. You will be amazed at the amount of repeat business that isn't done. Follow up with a reason. If you sent information and you told them you were going to follow up in a couple of day then call them and remind them why you are calling. Don’t just call and pass the time of day. The girl in starbucks is there for that when they buy their latte in the morning. When they buy, and you deliver, call them and thank them and ask for more business. If you don’t ask you don’t get.
10. IT'S OK TO FAIL - If something doesn't work then just try something else. If you fail, learn why and DONT DO IT AGAIN. Cold Calling is not about throwing darts, it's about strategy and being innovative. And failure isn't failure. It's something else. Just like Broke is temporary but Poor is a condition. Failure isn't forever. Fail is feedback. When a person says no, that’s when your job as a salesperson starts.

Saturday 2 January 2010

Time for a Wake-Up call





So here we are in a New Year and I am looking at a few newspapers. The broadsheets and the tabloids. I have been watching the news and listening to the radio and checking out the internet and I have seen some amazing stats.


36m mobile phones sold.
£3.5 BILLION taken in Oxford Street over the Christmas shopping period.
The average spend per person at Christmas was £85. (Which means if someone spent less than that on you tell him or her to take a hike!)
There was more money spent over the bar on alcohol than any other Christmas season.
More Champagne was sold this year.
More Holidays were given as Christmas presents than any year before.
More people ate out at Christmas than any year before.
More people had a catered Christmas or just had their Christmas Dinner at a restaurant than ever before.
More money was taken at the sales than ever before.
The queues were longer than any other year.


As I was reading all of this a couple of words kept popping into my head.
I don’t know whether these stats are real or just hype but even if the figures are half of those listed the same two words keep popping in my head.
As I walked around the streets of London buying presents I saw lots of people laden down with bags. The restaurants were full. The champagne bar was three deep in Selfridges. The food hall in Selfridges was packed to the rafters. You would need a shoehorn to get in. There was a queue for the changing rooms in all the major stores.
Those two words came back into my head.
The theatres were packed with people buying tickets for West End shows at £65 plus per time as presents.
Those two words?
Wait...there isn't a cab around. They are all full. Every cab driving by has a passenger. The tubes are packed. The streets are packed. Everywhere is packed and people are spending money like no tomorrow.
"Cab!"
Great, he saw me.
"Where to Guv?"
"Monument, please." I said as I got in and closed the door with a satisfying clunk.
I am now in the back of the cab. Outside there are thousands of people with millions of carrier bags going in billions of directions. Billions of pounds being spent.
What were those two words again...?
"Done all your shopping?" the driver asked me.
"I think so," I replied, "It's a nightmare out there."
"Yeah..." he laughed, "Credit Crunch!?!?"
Oh yeah, those were the two words...what happened to that?

Resolutions


Happy New Year
New Year's Resolutions are a great way to set your intent for a positive, fulfilling year of growth and accomplishment. But, on the other hand, when the year ends, if you haven't completely fulfilled your resolutions, it can be frustrating.
This usually happens because New Year's resolutions are often too vague, and don't include practical steps that lead to a clearly defined goal.
So today, by all means, make your usual big-picture resolutions. But, in addition, I'm going to suggest you make some sub-resolutions.
Each of these sub-resolutions is designed to give you a long-term benefit (some of them even for a lifetime) with a minimum amount of time and effort. In fact, each of these sub-resolutions can be completed in anything from a few minutes to, at the very most, a few hours. And they're all either free or very cheap .For most of you, many of these items fall into the category of things you've "been meaning to do." Since chances are that you have already accomplished at least a few of the items on the list below, there's no reason why you can't take half a day this week and get at least six more of the items below done.
So, in the interest of the betterment of your future, the management of your life, and the fresh start of a new year, here are
THINGS YOU CAN DO IN ONE DAY TO IMPROVE YOUR LIFE
1. Register your full name as a web domain if you haven't yet. You never know when you're going to want your personal website. If www.[yourname].com is already taken, don't worry - there are alternatives. For example, who owns jamesjoyce.com? Answer: A bar in Dublin beat the author's estate to it. But there are always other options, like hyphenating the name and getting james-joyce.net or james-joyce.org (check those sites now if you'd like), or choosing less common TLDs (or end letters) like .ws or .me.
For more information, homestead.com is a great site to register and design your own website.
2. Call your mobile phone provider. Ask if you can get a better calling plan based on your usage. This way you can afford to do the next item on this list.
3. Subscribe to a newspaper or magazine. Choose a topic that you don't know about - be it politics, fashion, culture, or technology- and sign up for the best periodical covering that topic. Rather than choosing the most popular magazine, select one that offers the most in-depth and interesting coverage, like Wired for technology or Foreign Affairs for politics or Mental Floss for culture. Yes, you could read it all online, but it's great to have a physical magazine to read when you're on the subway or on an aeroplane or waiting in line somewhere.
4. Get a passport if you don't have one. If yours has expired, get it renewed now. You never know when that great travel opportunity is going to occur, and you don't want to get stuck at home while your friends are at some great concert at the Acropolis in Greece.
5. Back it up. Most people don't take the time to do this, and regret it later. So copy your entire hard drive onto an external drive or USB stick immediately; if possible, download a program like Acronis True Image that will simplify the restoring process and regularly make backups (or for Mac owners, start using Time Machine or SuperDuper). Also backup your mobile phone, PDA, and any other personal-information-storing device.
6. While you're at it, make photocopies of your credit cards, passport, drivers license, birth certificate, and other important papers. If you keep a journal or anything similarly irreplaceable, photocopy that. Keep these in a safe deposit box, parent's house, locked file cabinet, or any other secure location, preferably outside your own house. They'll be invaluable in the event of theft, loss, fire, or any other unplanned incident.
7. Look through your refrigerator and cabinets. Read the labels on the food. Stop buying anything high in saturated fats, trans fats,cholesterol, and sodium. And start shopping healthier today.
8. Get business cards. Don't have a business? It doesn't matter. Sites like vistaprint.com will send you 250 free ones (though there's a shipping fee of under £6). Never hurts to look professional
9. Learn how you work: I'm often asked what books I found the most useful for learning Sales, NLP and Business. I will be posting my recommendations next.
10. This is not for everyone, but some of you--and you know who you are--definitely need to do this: Throw out all your socks. Every last one. Now go buy new pairs that actually match and don't have holes in them. You'll feel like a new man. Remember, get black socks. White socks are for athletic activities only. I don't want to catch any of you guys here wearing white socks in the boardroom!
11. Buy a suit. (Or a dress if you're a woman.) But don't just get any suit or dress. Get one that's slightly closer to the size you want to be this year, whether it be a little bigger or a little smaller than your current measurements. Try it on every Saturday morning as a reminder to yourself to get in shape this year; until, one day, it fits perfectly, and you wear it out and feel like a million pounds
12. Decide to actually become a millionaire.

Happy New Year

Well how was your Christmas and New Year. Mine was good and now with 2010 here I have major plans both business wise and personal. Business will be discussed on here, personal is mine so it wont be!! Ha Ha.
I saw the new year in coughing my guts up and wheezing from a cough that developed the day before but now, as I write, I have beaten it with something called Benalyn Mucus (Catchy title, huh?).
It was recommended to me by the pharmacist in Boots the Chemist on New Years Day.
"It's the best" she said before finding that they had sold out.
She then shouted across the store, "Can someone check if we have any Mucus out in the Storeroom?"
That was a head turner!!!!
They didnt...so I bought it in Sainsbury's. If you get a cough, buy it...it kicks ass!!