As you’ll see the new company is focused on helping other companies grow by helping with their sales strategies and plans, for more details feel free to drop me an email tom.reidy@catalyst90.com

I have also, and again with some help from people that are alot more tallented than me launched a new software tool designed to help sales people and how they quote for work - check out catalystQUE for more.

Tom Reidy
Catalyst90

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Watch the below for at least 20seconds - defiantly gives a laugh!

Wii fun on YouTube

Toxic Mortgages

A great example of creatively dishonest product development and sales!

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Kindly supplied by the AdGabber site http://www.adgabber.com/

I was inspired by the great chef Gordon Ramsey last night watching an episode of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. Once again a restaurant was failing miserably, first thing Gordon did was to sort out the Kitchen and then forced them to up the marketing and PR - even getting out on the street to pull the punters!

This is so how any business should operate - make sure the core operation is functioning to maximum efficiency (kitchen) and then get people in the door or purchasing what ever it is your selling!!

So back to the beginning hard work and good marketing will always work, and the bean counters should be there to aid and not hobble!

“the selling starts at NO.”

This is a great comment, however when is it good to ignore the word “no” and when is it good to shut up and listen?

Throughout my career and all the training courses I have done on and around sales the underlying theme has always been if a client says “no” they just have not understood correctly and you have to educate them further on the features and benefits.

Now to the most part this is true – however…

Sometimes it’s better to stop and listen to what they have to say – now may simply not be the right time for them.

I have won many of my biggest and most profitable clients by listening and simply keeping in touch – not selling, instead calling to say hi, or a coffee, and keeping in touch as tenacity can go a long way, the added advantage with keeping in touch will build the relationship and when they are ready to move the process will be a whole lot easier! And even better you end up with some great friends!

So yes it pays to probe further into the reason behind the “no” but it always pays more to listen!

Oddly enough unlike the title of my blog (The Tommy Gun) a machine gun approach to sale is not necessarily the best. Target shooting is much more effective.

Targeted and strategically sales are always more profitable when dealing in the business to business (B2B) market. Selling to a large client can often be a challenge as more often than not there are a lot of hoops to jump through, especially if you have a revolutionary product from a small start up that has little market presence.

The following I hope is a couple of techniques that I have found to be successful:

Shooting the big fish

To generate market awareness with a large client (big fish) it is often best to have them as the end goal with specific and focused steps to reach that goal. A great way of achieving this is to sell your services to the large companies suppliers, if you manage this process well they will often endorse becoming great advocates for you and even assist in selling you into you end target company. More so the supplying companies are often smaller and will be able to make a decision faster - all at the same time you can refine your pitch so that when you have the opportunity your pitch to the large goal company is silky smooth.

Partnership shooting

Another great approach is to working in with a partner as often they will have the ear of the target company and be able to assist in the persuasion. This also positions you as the expert in that particular field and will assist in building your profile and respect with the target company.
Furthermore partnering will often give you greater PR and access to the partnered companies’ clients. Choosing a partner is a fairly important task as they have to share the same philosophies as you and obviously have to be in a similar market - i.e. design agency and email marketing agency.

The Audience shot

My last tip for the day is choosing an audience - much the same as selling to the suppliers, when I first started working with Calcium the first group I sold to was small to medium size advertising agencies as all of these companies were already dealing with my target audience, plus the fact that mailPrimer is a solution they quickly understood they soon became my strongest advocates and suppliers of business. This also gives me a passive entry to their client base and fast market awareness.

So that’s sales 101 always happy to hear feedback or to hear your tips for sales.

Hold up…. surely if I was to have won this money they would have called me right? Surely if they are giving away half a million pounds they could afford the phone call to New Zealand to let me know?
And surely they could afford to have their own UK National lottery domain name instead of a Yahoo for the reply..?

Love this spam!!

This is one of the few SPAM emails that I have gotten through, nice but as mentioned above a few things don’t stack up…
The screamingly obvious are: I have never entered a competition, and the “from” email address is entirely different to the “reply” address in the email.

Looks like I have to carry on with the day job!! Dam!

If Muppets like this would stop sending this junk email marketing would be a lot easier!!

Thanks to the team at SMX I hardly ever get this rubbish though, in fact I think that was the first bit of spam in the last 6 months – thanks guys!