Barrett Sales Blog - Helping people and businesses to sell better

Celebrating adult learners & the positive power of lifelong learning

By Sue Barrett / 03/09/2021 / Attitudes & Behaviours, Blog, Education in Sales, Learning and Development, Life Skills, Sales Training

Learning doesn’t just happen in a school classroom with a teacher telling us what to learn – although that is how many people think of learning still. Learning happens everywhere anytime whether we are aware of it or not. Learning is an essential part of our evolution, our daily lives, and our daily survival strategies beyond the school gate. Interestingly, learning starts off as an intrinsic joy to children – Maria Montessori talks about the absorbent mind of children, inquisitive and curious about how the world around them and beyond operates. Oh, the joys of being a curious, courageous adventurous …

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Staying in touch for all the right reasons

By Sue Barrett / 27/08/2021 / Attitudes & Behaviours, Blog, Call Reluctance, Prospecting, Sales Results, Sales Tips

Prospecting is the function and ability to ignite opportunities with new and existing clients, new markets, within communities. Prospecting opens many doors if we are prepared to do it – consistently.

However, prospecting is probably the least favourite activity of people in business. Some people don’t know how to prospect which is a big deterrent to any task. But that can be easily fixed with training and coaching. Even so, others seem to find every excuse under the sun not to call someone.

It’s not the right time. What if they are busy? What if they say …

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The Characteristics of World Class Entrepreneurs & Change Agents

By Sue Barrett / 19/08/2021 / Attitudes & Behaviours, Blog, Entrepreneurship, Sales Skills, Success

In my last article: Are Entrepreneurs & Change Agents Born or Made, we explored the importance of nurture, education, and environment to help cultivate our inner entrepreneur and/or change agent.

This time I’d like to present a list of characteristics or qualities that are often, if not always, present in those who become world class in this space.

While being born with high fluid intelligence, high openness to being creative and open to new ideas, and moderate agreeableness -i.e. being somewhat warm, friendly, and tactful with the ability to get along well with others- really helps, it shouldn’t stop …

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Are entrepreneurs & change agents born or made?

By Sue Barrett / 13/08/2021 / Blog, Entrepreneurship, Life Skills, Self Development, Success

Are successful entrepreneurs and change agents born or made? This is an important question because it can affect how people see themselves and what they aim for.

Let’s start first with some basic definitions:

Entrepreneur: Entrepreneurship is defined as the act of starting and running your own business or a tendency to be creative and wish to work for yourself in your own ventures.

Change Agent: A change agent is a person from inside or outside an organisation who helps an organisation, or part of an organisation, to transform how it operates. They can be thought of as a catalyst for change, a …

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Tender and Proposal Management in the Rebuild

By Bidwrite / 05/08/2021 / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Blog, Tendering

Sales trend 8 from the 12 Sales Trends for 2021 Report is about the changes in the tendering process, and how to tender better in the rebuild.

By guest author David Lunn, Principal – Bid Write, specialised tender and proposal management services firm.

The Tender and Proposal Management function inside the B2B sales process involves producing written offers (e.g. tenders, proposals, quotations) to supply goods or services. These are most commonly prepared in response to invitations issued as part of a competitive sourcing process. In common parlance – tendering or bidding.

As we progress …

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In your clients’ shoes: is it easy to deal with your business?

By Sue Barrett / 28/07/2021 / Blog, Brand & Reputation, Customer experience, Customer Service, Human-centred

I don’t think people will find it surprising that in the last year, in particular, business leaders – those leaders of corporations and big business- have been focusing on making managing and dealing with clients more ‘efficient’ for their businesses. We all know that means automating as much as possible.

This is not new, businesses, especially those in B2C markets with lots of consumers like airlines, travel operators, banks, telcos, energy providers, and so on have taken on customer automation with gusto but it seems to have gone to the extreme. The extremes of customer automation now make it virtually impossible …

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An Antidote to Corruption: Human-centred Business & Sales

By Sue Barrett / 22/07/2021 / Attitudes & Behaviours, Blog, Ethics & Values, Human-centred, Selling Better

We know where there’s corruption you will always find poor or no governance, lack of transparency, nepotism, poor work conditions that exploit the vulnerable, high staff turnover, profit maximisation and cost stripping at the expense of sustainability, tax avoidance, and unethical leaders, underpinned by vested interests, at the helm of enterprises looking for self-enrichment at our expense promoting the ‘greed is good’ mantra.

For almost 20 years, Australia ranked in the top 10 least corrupt countries. However, by 2018, we’d fallen 8 points to 13. The fact that we are falling down the scale raises serious questions about the …

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Case Study – Human-centred Sales Systems Transformation

By Sue Barrett / 15/07/2021 / Blog, Case study, Human-centred, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Results, Sales Strategy, Sales System, Strategy, Success

The client: a $4B division of a listed corporation specialising in Wholesale & Retail. The division is a combination of B2B sales (wholesale), B2C sales across several retail brands, service areas, marketing, and procurement and it includes 200+ people.

The challenges when we started working with them late 2017-early 2018:

The business had acquired a mix of companies over the years and there was no integration, no common language, no consistency, etc.

The business was in flux and sales and share price were in decline.

There was poor customer retention.

Several key brands were being disrupted.

Sales and services teams were not trained to deliver to …

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Seven Things to Kick Start Sales Growth in the New FY

By Sue Barrett / 08/07/2021 / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Blog, covid-19, Customer Service, Education in Sales, Learning and Development, Opportunity, Remote selling, Sales Growth, Sales Leadership, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Sales System, Sales Tips, Sales Training, Strategy

No mucking around. Let’s get straight to the point.

Things have changed -dramatically- as a result of COVID with new opportunities and markets emerging, old ways of doing things in decline, leaders and teams needing to rethink how we do business, and customers trying out different ways of buying and engaging with suppliers. There’s no time to stand still it seems, but that is what we need to do sometimes to catch our breath, reset, and look at what we need to do next.

So here are 7 things you can do to get real sales traction and sustainable sales and business …

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The new versatility in learning

By Jens Hartmann / 29/06/2021 / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Blog, covid-19, Education in Sales, Learning and Development, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Uncategorized

Sales Trend 7 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2021 explores the changes in Learning and Development that precipitated as a consequence of lockdowns and other restrictions.

By Jens Hartmann, Head of Learning & Development – Barrett

2020 has been a devastating year, there is no amount of glossing over that can change that. But, interestingly, it has brought positive consequences for some important aspects of Learning & Development. It fast-tracked and enforced changes that many people were reluctant to apply or didn’t know about. Within 6 months it had pushed people’s approach to learning further …

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