Sales Training & Skippering

Long time, no blog entries !!

I've been very busy getting the business going and had some early success. In fact given the short time that it's been up and running, we've had some very encouraging interest. Our first customer was Mitel Networks who are a global manufacturer of IT equipment. They were followed by Redstone Converged Solutions who are in the same market and Anite Telecom who make mobile phone testing hardware and software. We're very close to signing up another 2 or 3 companies as well. Mitel are having all of their sales people trained by us as well some other customer facing personnel. We've trained them all in general sales skills already delivering the courses over the last two months. Negotiation skills, Account Planning and Forecasting are still to be delivered between now and the end of October.

We are finding that a few areas are of particular interest to sales teams and one of them is forecasting. There may be an opportunity to design some forecasting software or at least act as a reseller for an existing software house. It's also been quite surprising how many companies don't have any stating sales cycle or structured qualification processes. Some parts of our courses go down very well including a session on "how sales people are measured" and discussion about being out of one's comfort zone.

We've tentatively come up with an acronym that encompasses all of the cornerstones within our methodologies which is.....PROMPT Selling. It stands for Proposition, Retain, Opportunity, Measurement, Process & Traits. We need to develop it further and then get it registered as a trademark.

Oh yea, we've also re-designed our logo - well, when I say "we" I mean Richard's (my business partner), daughter's boyfriend, a design student. And a good job he's done as well, I think you'll agree

I have also been busy on the water doing some skippeing for a company in the Solent called Impression Sailing who are a very nice bunch of people. The work has mainly consisted of taking complete novices out racing for the day which has proved to be extremely challenging. However, like most things in life, it's also hugely rewarding, especially when you get them all back safely alongside and they've had a good day. Interestingly enough, you have as many sailing qualifications as you like but you only really start learning when you do it for real. It's one of those disciplines that will take years and years to master and every single time I go out I learn something new.

You certainly wouldn't do it for money though. It must be the most disproportionate job in terms of pay versus responsibility. It's really good experience though - we obviously want to be providing this sort of thing to our customers in the future. We have in fact already got one customer that is interested in doing some team building on yachts later this year. We're also speaking to a number of companies about the prospect of sponsoring a regatta next year that may involve between 10 and 15 boats.

Other news - I am currently living in Poole in a flat with a magnificent view over the harbour, but it's a bit rubbish in terms of location for work. So, I'm moving at the end of September and the likely place is looking like St Albans, just north of London. I've got a facebook profile (because I am young, hip and trendy). There is lots of sailing photo's there for the lovers of all things yachting.

We should be sailing this week, down the south west coast, however, the weather has put paid to that, lots of force 6 & 7 winds in the channel and rough sea. It was supposed to be a week of glorious sailing and chilling but we had to knock it on the head in the end - it just wasn't much fun, bashing through big seas. So, we're getting some work done instead.

That's all for now.