“Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields - very high, high, average, low or very low.”

This is the question that Americans are asked every year by the Gallup Poll.

This survey has been conducted by the Gallup Poll in the US each year for the past 30 years and, once again, this year American customers rate car salesman as having the very lowest of standards.

••• Click here to go to Gallup Poll results…

The costly failure of this ‘close-the-sale’ strategy is well documented and nothing has so damaged the image of the sales profession than this selling disease. It’s difficult to see how young salespeople could be misled more than to be given the impression that their job is to ‘close the sale’.

FACT: You cannot close the sale. The decision to buy is an electro-chemical event that takes place in the brain of the customer. The salesperson cannot control that event. What the salesperson  can do however, is to create an opportunity for that event to happen–starting and making a sales call.

FACT:  The salesperson opens the sale by making the call, the customer closes the sale by deciding to buy—YES–or not to buy–NO.

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A mimo is a message. IN and OUT.
MI is Message In.
MO is Message Out.

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In Chapter 24 The Message (page 219) I have written more about mimos and messaging in WOMBAT Selling: How to Sell by Word of Mouth: ••• Download the ebook here …

When it comes to intellectual capital the message is the medium. The message is THE most fundamental unit of intellectual capital. I believe that the message is about to take a quantum leap and that we are on the threshold of a whole new appreciation of its importance in the business context.

- page 223, WOMBAT Selling

••• Download the ebook here …

The Crazy Egg guys have taken a different approach to web analytics display. With their Heat Maps you can measure and actually see what your users are doing when they visit your site, and from these results you can quickly optimize your site based on your visitors usage patterns.

The result is, using Heat Maps, that you can learn a lot more about your visitors with from a lot less information that is found in many other analytics packages.

••• Check it out here ….

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist and Hyunyoung Choi, Decision Support Engineering Analyst.

Can Google queries help predict economic activity?

The answer depends on what you mean by “predict.” Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month.

Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like “Automotive/Vehicle Shopping” during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.

That famous economist Yogi Berra once said “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” This inspired our approach: let us lower the bar and just try to predict the present.

Our work to date is summarized in a paper called Predicting the Present with Google Trends. We find that Google Trends data can help improve forecasts of the current level of activity for a number of different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behavior.

Even predicting the present is useful, since it may help identify “turning points” in economic time series. If people start doing significantly more searches for “Real Estate Agents” in a certain location, it is tempting to think that house sales might increase in that area in the near future.

••• Read the full article …

NEWSCIENTIST:  In the time it takes you to read this sentence, more than a thousand tweets will have been twittered and dozens of blogs posted. Much of their content will be ephemeral fluff: personal gripes and tittle-tattle interesting to no one but the parties concerned. Yet despite this, it is possible to use that torrent of information to make predictions about social and economic trends that affect us all.

Interest in the idea of analysing web data to make predictions took off around a year ago, when researchers at Google used the frequency of certain search terms to forecast the sales of homes, cars and other products.

In their landmark study, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, and his colleague Hyunyoung Choi showed how the volume of searches for certain products, such as types of car, rose and fell in line with monthly sales. Google keeps extensive records of what is being searched for, and that information is available almost instantaneously. That could make Varian and Choi’s method a far quicker way of gauging purchasing behaviour than traditional sales forecasts, which are often made by looking back at purchasing patterns.

••• Read the full article …

FINANCIAL Services Minister Chris Bowen has hit back at opposition claims that banning commissions to financial planners will put advice out of reach of those who cannot pay an upfront fee, saying consumers can negotiate with advisers to give them a percentage of their funds.

The government has said it will legislate to outlaw kick-backs for planners by 2012 to protect consumers from corporate collapses such as the crash of Storm Financial.

However thousands of people will continue to receive advice tainted by commissions paid to financial advisers because the ban will not come into force until July 2012. Any contracts for financial advice struck before then will not be subject to the ban.

The opposition appears unlikely to back the changes and at least one crossbench senator was yesterday unconvinced about them.

Family First senator Steve Fielding, who used to work in the industry super fund sector, which does not pay commissions, said he had not decided if he would support the ban. “Affordability of advice is a real concern but you also have to balance that against making sure people are not being advised to go into funds that are no good for them,” he said.

It was originally shown at a DK sales conference.

One of my favourite Drucker quotes which I refer to regularly is:
“There are two functions, and two functions only, of any business: innovation and marketing”.

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A research discipline that’s still in its infancy, NeuroMarketing uses high–tech brain scanning techniques, such as fMRI and EEG, to investigate brain activity. This neuro–imaging hardware enables us to examine and analyze what really drives our behavior, our opinions, our preference for Corona over Budweiser, iPods over Zunes, or McDonald’s over Wendy’s.

••• Click through to original article …