Business Ideas For Smes And Start Ups

If you've tried writing a blog for your website, what is the most important thing for you? Creating more SEO content? Posting engaging and meaningful content for prospects and potential customers? Satisfying Google? Making sales? Some of the above? Over the last year I had been looking at a number of AI content providers - Jasper being the first and more recently, ChatGPT. To get a sense of the current popularity of Chat, try accessing the platform on a Sunday evening as the world sits down to Netflix and Chat, preparing content for the week ahead. Big question - can AI replace humans when it comes to writing good content? Discuss...

Three weeks from now the Qatar World Cup will be over and our news media will be filled with other local, regional, national or international stories, all made important by editorial staff, driving circulations and audience figures to satisfy greedy media owners and large corporations. Think of everything else that's ongoing in our world just now - there are plenty of news worthy items to lead the way. Alas, there can be only 1 lead news item as we all compete for time and interest. When you are reaching out to decision maker its important to remember how far down a list of CEO's priorities you sit - and to remember the role you have in promoting 'that problem' that you solve. Getting their attention - and how you go about that is critical

If you think you don't have enough acronyms in your life then this podcast is for you. Thinking acronyms in sales - BANT, ANUM, FAINT...so many that are centred on the N word...NEED. I share a story about working in a start up and building a pipeline of sales to almost £2m...based on what the customer needed...Except it turns out that they didn't need it...

Oonagh O'Reilly has been involved in sales in one form or another from the early days learning on the farm to various high performing roles with the NI Chamber of Commerce, The IFA and the ICC Belfast. We have a varied conversation - the importance of having a purpose and vision, getting a handle on the basics of sales and marketing which allows you to not have to worry about revenue and some valuable life lessons from working on the farm. As a high performing athlete, playing GAA for her native county, Oonagh is clearly as focused on success in her role as Sales and Marketing Director of the ICC

With sales training there aren't many guarantees although the degree of certainty does improve dependant on a number of factors. A clear strategy, willingness to learn & coach-ability, strong leadership, a sound and understood culture, buy-in. I try hard to live by the idiom "it's not about being right but about doing the right thing that matters." Behavioural change isn't easy - especially if you own the business or if you are a sales leader at manager or director level. Guesting on this episode of the Shift Control Sales is Benjamin Dennehy - self titled as The UK's most hated sales trainer. A befitting title for someone controversial and outspoken? Perhaps, but Benjamin's iconoclastic approach to sales training is definitely worth considering if you are serious about performance improvement in your team. We cover a lot of ground that might make for some uncomfortable listening for a few people...mainly sales leaders and business owners as he (and me) call out some behaviours that are responsible for u

Emotional intelligence fits in as a logical 3rd episode in this series...all about being more self aware, understanding what prompts your feelings and the responses to those feelings. 2 men that I worked with in the past used to say: 'Try and see the picture in the other man's head.' Says it all - or most of it anyway - Daniel Goleman gets the credit for EQ and he is worth checking out in TED Talk format if not his books which can be somewhat heavy

We all suffer from setbacks - there is no escaping that fact. In sales we think that we encounter more of them on a daily basis - rejection, ghosting, the competition, the economy all can put greater pressure on us to perform. In this brief podcast, through my work as a coach and as a sales person, I share some tips that might help you build up your resilience and deal better with the challenges thrown at you everyday. Always remember nothing lasts forever - good or bad - just try and ready yourself for the turbulence which is guaranteed to show up.

A short series of podcasts on the stuff that sales people can look after on their own so as to make their sales time more productive and more craic. I hate the media - not irrationally I hope, but I've an understanding of how the machine works and how it impacts our well-being. Negativity and bad news is the order of the day - lets not include the call in shows etc...but the morning news is one bad news story after another and that kind of impact can be far-reaching if your going to start work at 8.30am. Change the channel - podcast, audiobook or music...anything but the news. How we forget the headline manipulation, phone-tapping, lies, promotion of self interest...it's nothing new...

Hugh Gilmore has spent over a decade providing sport psychology support to Olympians and Paralympians, coaches and the associated multidisciplinary teams. He is passionate about training people in Motivational Interviewing, (MINT Member) and has also trained in Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT**) at the Albert Ellis institute in NYC. (**Acronym alert) In this podcast we discuss the broad area of building culture within teams - Hugh introduces many of the disciplines and theories that he has applied to Olympic & world class weightlifting and athletics teams. I learnt about OAP - Observable, Achievable, Promotable - if you are changing your cultural behaviour internally does it follow the 3...is it observable? is it achievable? is it promotable? I learned about the difference between informal and formal culture. And I learnt about REBT - Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. Much of what we do in the sales environment is process driven but at the very core sits people - employees, customers and prosp

I watched a brilliant documentary over the weekend on Ange Postecoglou and his 12 month transformation of Celtic. You look on in awe at the speed of the cultural transformation, the off-field impact that has turned around on-file performance. IT's important to take a sense check on what is possible with a sales team referenced from a sports team. There are some major contextual differences and i reference a few of them in this podcast - recovery, downtime, performance analysis, food, mental and emotional wellbeing and physical exercise all come into play. I reference the book Sales Cybernetics (again)- It's sold out on Amazon but you can get it on Ebay...Pricey but worth it in my opinion.

I won't lie to you on this one but there are 100 + resources online that could help you write better sales content. My perspective is a bit more basic than that - if you don't write a lot with your work, if you write mainly with acronyms and text-speak, if you didn't pass your English O'Level, GCSE, then you need to get a handle on the very basics of writing. The short cut to great sales copy doesn't exist. Having a great conversational sales style is of no benefit to you if you cannot write in a way so that you can be understood. I have mentioned it before in other episodes - storytelling - maybe that should be story writing, ultimately you need to be able to write emails, letters (YES letters), direct marketing copy, presentations, etc... To do that you need to understand the basic principles of grammar, format, etc... I hope this episode helps underline that and point you towards some good books to help - STEPHEN KING & STRUNK and WHITE are 2 great places to start.

Some thoughts on account management that I wanted to share with you. I often see the roles as being under-developed within organisations and can be a number of reasons for that which I highlight briefly in this episode. Do you have the right people looking after the right accounts? Are you ignoring some potential accounts based on their current value to you rather than their lifetime value? Do your account managers understand the true value that you bring to those relationships? Portfolio selling? Partnerships and collaborations - real and meaningful ones... Have you created a strategic plan for those high value accounts? And finally the sales pitch - do you think your people could do with some more sales training?

Curious to see how the return to work or the continued working from home is impacting your sales culture and how you are able to inject the spark into the weekly sales meeting/huddle/symposium or whatever you are calling it. For me there are some core issues that need to be discussed - as a broad framework - and everything else is built around that. What you want to come from the sales meeting is energy, focus and clarity. There needs to be a little fun and craic but its all about the big picture - revenue, sales and performance improvement. 1. Statistics that measure the productivity and performance of everyone in the team. 2. What happened since the last meeting 3. A preview of the week ahead 4. Problems + solutions 5. Performance against target / year on year / etc... 6. Something curious or lighthearted...but sincere!

Sales cadence is structured rhymthic ale

45% of everything we do is habitual. That's around 6 hours a day that you're leaving in the incapable hands of your subconscious / unconscious mind. It made me think this morning of the challenge sales coaching presents to everyone involved - the business owner, the sales person AND me. Who wants to be told that what they have been doing for the last X years isn't as good as it good be? Lets face it - not everyone is coachable even though they say that they are. Business owners want the coaching done - they want it to be effective but they usually want it done quickly...GOOD, FAST, CHEAP...pick 2, remember? This podcast is all about being careful what you wish for - managing expectations and committing to the process.

I could sound hypocritical here but everything I talk about here I struggle with from time to time - the biggest challenge I have is working rom home and having that consistent discipline to grind it out for 7 and 1/2 hours a day. Working from home will be a challenge for sales execs and fro business owners alike - how it fixes itself remains to be seen. But it's not the only challenge - poor diary management, elongated and meaningless conversations, selling to the wrong person and a few others...

There are myriad resources telling you all about the art of asking questions in sales - if you've not come across any, it's worth googling. Everyone knows about open and closed questioning techniques - high impact questions, directional, and and and... Sales effectiveness isn't about asking questions - IMHO - it's about curiosity...having an interest that goes beyond superficially asking a list of questions. Sales isn't about police-style interrogation...it's about curiously getting underneath the skin of your prospect in a meaningful and sincere way. struggling with the concept - think PINT OF GUINNESS...the white stuff is you talking and the black stuff is you listening. Build your questions around that, if you like

Most businesses will admit to following a strategic model for business development activities yet when things go wrong or a challenge appears from the competition or the marketplace, occasionally they head straight for tactics. In his biography Alastair Campbell talked in depth about OST - objectives, strategy, tactics - I have interviewed PR Smith on this podcast in the past - where he talks about his business model SOSTAC. It's important to always have a clear objective that you can refer to - in good times or in bad. I use PR Smith's model for all my business development work simply because it's intuitive and makes planning really easy for both sales and marketing functions.

Some time ago I received a letter from a company who were representing a number of media companies and photography agencies. 2 letters actually, in and around the same time. Both asking for a serious amount of money to pay for a license for misuse of 2 images...otherwise court and a big fine and costs. Google the company...PicRights...not something that you want to get caught up in because the hassle and cost is far far greater than any cool use of an image - in my case Lionel Messi and Russian soldiers marching in Red Square on May Day parade.

Having worked in marketing for a car manufacturer and a car retailer, having coached a number of sales teams within the automotive sector, I still fall back on my role as a customer when it comes to critiquing the sector. Too often it's easy to criticise - for me, way too often and so it is always good to be able to give credit where it is due. I was buying a car for a friend coming over to Ireland from France - simple requirements, buy an automatic costing less than £10,000. This is a brief story of that journey and how a tangible lack of interest by 2 car dealers made me buy a more expensive car with 10,000 more miles on the other side of the country,