Consider your last rail journey.  Where did actual journey time fall in your list of priorities? (Unless, of course, the train was badly delayed or cancelled.)  Would the saving of 20 minutes to the journey time have come above getting a seat? Or a clean environment?  If you are anything like me I suspect not. [...]

November 25, 2010 by Helen Blake

Surprise, surprise! Customers are human beings with distinct personalities, needs and wants. Yet for largely commercial and expediency reasons most companies send exactly the same piece of communication to every customer. Some undertake a degree of customer segmentation which may result in a different offer or subtly changed wording in the communication. It may even [...]

November 16, 2010 by Helen Blake

The next time you tell someone that you love Social Media this might be a much truer statement than you realise. Oxytocin is the so called ‘cuddle hormone’ credited with forming the unshakable bond between mother and daughter and in stimulating empathy, trust and generosity. A recent nine year study by Paul Zak, Professor at [...]

August 3, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Do customers view the quality of customer service as a key factor in deciding whether to do business with you?   The answer may surprise you. Too many businesses still view customer service as a cost of doing business rather than as an opportunity to do more business. Consequently they outsource their customer service call centres [...]

August 3, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Today’s Times newspaper shows a great example of what happens when you come up with a great idea, even ‘The Big Idea’, internally but fail to ask and test it with your customers, in this case UK voters.  A salutary lesson for all those internally made-up value propositions.  As we repeatedly say, you MUST engage [...]

May 8, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

“If Bill Gates had been British he’d be running the largest software company in Guildford by now.” A former Design Council chair once remarked. We seem to be great in the UK at innovation but not so good at bringing ideas to market and making a profit.  Why are we so bad at commercialising innovation? [...]

February 8, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

What is a sales person’s value proposition? This very interesting question was posed recently on LinkedIn.  The questioner asked: Is it Product Knowledge? Is It Customer Relationship? Is it Negotiation or Communications Skills? In this era of Web 2.0 – where buyers are better informed and demanding and have direct access to vendors and in [...]

January 17, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Laid up in bed before Christmas with the inevitable holiday flu, I was watching re-runs of QI, a very funny and clever British quiz show hosted by the wonderful Stephen Fry.  They were talking about Paris Syndrome which is the extreme culture shock experienced by Japanese tourists upon visiting Paris.  Apparently the difference in Latin [...]

January 5, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Waiting in my local florist last week I was struck by the increasing polarisation between sales styles. Being served was a young girl about to get married who was very emotional and wanted her wedding flowers to be ‘just perfect’ but she didn’t really know what she wanted. I listened as the very patient sales [...]

December 2, 2009 by Cindy Barnes

Or, ‘how does having more to choose from affect your choice’? Have you ever felt so daunted by the amount of different things to choose from that you ended up not choosing anything at all? If so, you are not alone, as the results from the following experiment show. A stall was set up in [...]

July 16, 2009 by Cindy Barnes