The early start this morning wasn’t just to catch up on the overnight Google Reader (where I’ve pretty much dropped del.icio.us in favour of the search on GReader and shared items).
Headed over to the Bristol Golf Course (bit of a sterotype thing going on there) and was promised the secret of being ‘Disgustingly good at selling’. Saundu Hellings from riskHIVE and Barry Watson from PolicyCheck did an admirable job of presenting their take on sales and building the relationship with the customer (even if Barry did some across at time a little sterotypically wide boy sales man).
They were somewhat outclassed by Nick Drake-Knight (NDK Group & Performance in People Ltd) who I’ve heard speak before. Nick had a very clear process he advocated (the NDK Group website has pdf flyers), the 10 min was just about enough to rattled through his Rapport – Understand – Demonstrate – Recommend – Close. The questions provided scope for Nick to expand on the process. The setting wasn’t really appropriate for details and the whole event was under Chattem House to encourage openess, which worked very well.
The breakfast side of things was OK, but the table layout meant that once we’d chatted around the table and done the business card shuffle, you couldn’t very easily hop to another table. After the formal meeting, the tables pretty much meant you had to relocate to talk to anyone, which didn’t make for informal serendipitous meetings. As it was I had another conference to shoot off to so didn’t hang around quite as long as I’d normally have wanted to.
On the basis of this, I’m not about to sign up for the whole IoD package – BarCamp is a much better use of the money, I’m pretty confident I’ll learn more.