Grombles

Should have listened to the wife. "Buy an iPad" she says. "No", says I, "Androids are more popular so why spend £600 on an iJobs that's incompatible with the rest of the world when I can spend £150 on a tablet that's faster and does everything any iJobs can do - and it's part of Google not Jobble". Big mistake! (But don't tell her) We'd already experimented with a Samsung Galaxy Android phone and gave up trying to sync it with Outlook (let alone get it to dial a phone number). Everything seemed deliberately hidden behind fiddly little pictures and horrible little icons that suggested nothing. Swiping and clicking and dragging and tossing in the air and shaking it and using a combination of feet, hands and shouting at it to see if there was some hidden control to make it do things I thought it might, drove us mad. We sent it back to Vodafone and paid over the top, again, for another iJobs. But I wasn't going to be sucked into a...

I clicked on my iGoogle bookmark. Instead of the usual array of bits and pieces, I got this: Seems openness can backfire sometimes.

I've long espoused the need for sales and marketing professionals to stop focussing exclusively on how to promote themselves to what they call their target markets (like all their competitors), but to develop cunning ways to approach prospects who for one reason or another might be more receptive to purchasing something because of the situation they are in. I talk about finding their optimum POP - Potential Of Purchase. It might be because of a timing opportunity, a safety issue, an event, a location, something to do with the weather, their health or a combination of these and many more factors. The trick is to look for those opportunities where their propensity to buy something has been increased in some way - and then find a way to impress them. Perhaps even surprise them. For example: You're sitting at a table in a pub with an empty glass in front of you. Instead of having to take the glass to the bar to ask for a refill, wouldn't you be more likely to buy another if a...