Difference in Salary a Master’s Degree Makes

Does getting a Masters degree really matter? Surely a first degree is good enough to qualify for a decent job these days? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But when you consider how many people there are out there with a first degree (ie a BA, Bsc etc) then going further and getting a post-graduate diploma…

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Is the Glass Ceiling Getting any Thinner?

Yes OK, the question must be what is a bloke doing writing about the glass ceiling? I’ve been training several recruitment consultants lately and this was one of the areas we discussed. According to many of my students,  “When a guy wants a job badly, even if he can only do 60%, he will say…

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Sales Vs Marketing – Why don’t we talk to each other?

I walk the fine line between helping companies improve their sales processes and being a lecturer in Global Marketing and Sales Management. Most of my business comes from referrals, and frequently it isn’t the Sales or Marketing teams that ask for me, it’s the FD or the CEO, and it usually starts with a question.…

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What Exactly Are You Selling?

As a lecturer in Global Marketing and Sales Management, I spend a lot of time challenging my students to answer the Big question: How would you sell ‘This’? To keep up with changes in society and technology ‘This’ is changing rapidly, especially as the products, services and experiences that they will be selling may not…

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Universities and the Evolution of B2B Sales

The number of university attendees in the UK has risen in the last few years, and if there is one component which all Universities build into their curriculum, especially into their Masters level courses, it is the encouragement of critical thinking as a skill-set. Many of these graduates will be the decision makers of the…

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A long time ago in a country far, far away…..

When I was a youngster selling British building materials to Japanese contractors in Saudi Arabia, one of my colleagues used to trot out the same phrase every time an opportunity got stuck in the sales pipeline, “Business is easy, it is people that make it difficult!” As a newcomer to sales, I stupidly thought that…

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Sales Management Recruitment

I’ve always been a big believer in the concept that if you put enough people in a room with a large enough pot of coffee, eventually you can probably solve the majority of problems. I was thinking about this the other day when I was in a meeting with some academics discussing effectiveness (doing the…

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TRIZ in Sales – maybe it is Rocket Science

Process improvement is about solving problems, and the Sales and Marketing functions have these in bulk. The frameworks I use have proved themselves in manufacturing and operations processes over many years, and understanding how other disciplines treat similar contradictions is one of the pillars of TRIZ, so bear with me here….! One of the sales…

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