The easiest sales to close are the ones where the competition have left them wide open

Many years ago I worked alongside the sales team of a B2B2C financial services company. The Sales Director was getting frustrated at the lack of sales being closed, and became even more frustrated when he discovered that his sales managers weren’t sticking to the agreed script when they went out to see prospects.   He’d …

Beating the Billable Hours Behemoth

My heart goes out to those professional services marketing mangers who are constantly having to cajole partners in their firm to contribute something to the company blog.   “I’m tasked with hitting my billable hours, not writing window dressing for the website” goes the standard rebuttal.   And if you live or die in a …

Why account managers shouldn’t just do as they’re told

Many years back – goodness me, it was almost in the last century – I was a Senior Account Director at a long-gone London integrated advertising agency. For my sins, I was put in charge of annual graduate account management recruitment. Each year a new crop of prospective Frank Lowes* would turn up for our …