This week I attended the Learning Technology Exhibition and Conference in London.  These are my thoughts from the day that I spent there.

Season 18 of The Apprentice started on BBC1 recently and as usual, I will be watching and laughing along.  While it may style itself as a business show, it is first and foremost entertainment.  That being said, there are still things that we can learn from it.

Season 18 of The Apprentice started on BBC1 recently and as usual, I will be watching and laughing along.  While it may style itself as a business show, it is first and foremost entertainment.  That being said, there are still things that we can learn from it. Here’s my review of the latest episodes.

Season 18 of The Apprentice started on BBC1 recently and as usual, I will be watching and laughing along.  While it may style itself as a business show, it is first and foremost entertainment.  That being said, there are still things that we can learn from it. Here’s my review of the latest episodes.

Season 18 of The Apprentice started on BBC1 last week and as usual, I will be watching and laughing along.  While it may style itself as a business show, it is first and foremost entertainment.  That being said, there are still things that we can learn from it. Here’s my review of each episode.

Yesterday I spent some time at the World of Learning Summit in London. While not desperately well attended or inspiring, there were definitely some nuggets of interest on the exhibition floor.

Increased profits are usually the objective for every company.  There are a number of ways that this can be achieved but the most simple and effective way is to close more deals using your existing sales team.  However, they need to improve their efficiency and so require regular training in order to achieve this.

A recent talk at an exhibition got me thinking about what you can learn in one day and why continuous learning is so important.

Over the last few weeks, I have ran a couple of polls about how often people do sales training or should do sales training.  The overwhelming response was that it should be done every year.  However, I know for a fact that not every organisation does this so I then investigated why.  These are the results.

Continuous training is important for a company’s overall performance. If you want to be a high growth company, or just keep the profits that you currently have, investment in training for your staff is a simple way to achieve this.

Investing in your staff is crucial to the success of the company.  This cannot be a one-off investment, it has to be continuous.  We constantly need to be learning to enable us to do our jobs more effectively and more successfully.  Invest in sales training on a regular basis rather than just occasionally.

You may think that the answer to this question is relatively straight forward.  For many companies, it is simply about developing the skills required to do the job.  These skills might include finding customers, call planning, needs analysis, relationship building, negotiations etc.  However, these are just part of the knowledge that is required to be successful in sales.  The way that training is delivered also varies and can consist of a range of activities.

Why bother going to an exhibition if you are not going to make an effort to engage with your customer? Having just come back from a major exhibition, here are some of my thoughts on how to spend your time there productively.

I asked ChatGPT to tell me the three most important things for a sales person to do and guess what, it got the answer correct!

I lost an opportunity once because the CEO of the company was asked to leave! I had done everything correctly up to that point in order to win the deal but I still lost it. Sometimes that happens. You can read all about it here.

Before a customer can buy a product, they need to understand how that product will change their existing processes and why that change is a change for the better. If the product is simply presented to the customer without them understanding why they need to change, the opportunity will frequently be lost.

Presenting is all about communication. We want to get some message across to our audience, whether this a sales pitch, a plea for investment, instructions on how to manage a task or anything else. If the message is poorly presented, then no one is going to listen to it and we are wasting our time. Think about what you stand to benefit from a great presentation and then think about how much you might want to invest in ensuring that it is a great presentation.

The Apprentice on BBC1 gets some bad press. Mostly, I think, because people think that it is a real business programme rather than an entertainment programme. However, this does not mean that we cannot learn something from it.

To be successful in sales, you need to be able to close deals. However, closing is the easy part. The hard part is getting everything right up to that point. Here are five things that you need to focus on getting right to make closing easy.