The Shift Control Sales Podcast

Delighted to have Declan Coyle on this weeks podcast. Declan is a leadership, development and transformational coach who has worked with some of the most successful teams in GAA as well as helping out John Calipari of the University of Kentucky in 2012 on their way to a championship victory. This podcast moves from left to right, north to south and up and down - I was thinking about taking an edit...

I really enjoyed recording this podcast with Hugh Gilmore, a sports psychologist working with the British Weightlifting and athletic teams. I first crossed paths with Hugh 7-8 years ago whilst we were both offering different levels of support to the Queens University Sigerson team. On a recent podcast I heard Hugh talk about the comparisons with sport and business in terms of creating culture and...

Changing culture in an organisation doesn’t happen over-night. Attitudes and behaviours within an organisation are deep rooted and change takes time. Being adaptive, flexible and innovative are ‘ticket to entry’ behaviours for most organisations these days – brand values need to be reflected in individual and collective behaviours. Sounds straight forward yet there is often a clash between the des...

This podcast is a reflection on why some people engage in sales training successfully and why others don't. It's as easy to be the accused as it is the victim but my question is what really motivates business and business owners to engage with sales coaches if they expect a short term result. Would be interested in thoughts on this - everyone should be looking from a sweet spot customer - coaches...

Can anything that's processed be all that good for us? I'm thinking food to start with - what makes food accessible and gives it greater shelflife also as the potential in the long term to kill us. What about processed media? Can it have the same long term impact?

This podcast is unashamedly a sales pitch - the last few months have shaped a changing landscape in sales communication...people working from home, Zoom, Teams, WebEx calls with clients. IN March 2020, everything changed in the world of sales training and sales coaching, for me at least. Clients were less willing to continue training programmes in such uncertain times nor try any new technologies...

The latest Shift Control Podcast segues between current social and emotional anxieties and the importance of remembering that the default position for the human condition is one of calm, honesty, friendship and doing good. Not dissimilar to the behaviour required and the role of sales and business development. Trading anecdotes from the brilliant HumanKind, by Rutger Bregman and discussing the key...

Take 2. Institutional Trust. In light of recent events, I have thought long and hard about continuing the podcast series - sales and marketing isn't top of most peoples personal or professional agendas, and quite rightly. This episode focuses on institutional trust - or lack of - specifically within Media and Government, typified through the day to day activities of both, projected through social...

Driving down the road last week, I was listening to a Spotify playlist - Lynyrd Skynyrd - which had 2 versions of their 1970s classic, Freebird. It got me thinking about sales and about building trust - not in others but in yourself. Admittedly it's a cheap way for me to link two subjects that i love and am curious about... I hope you understand where I'm coming from and I'll not be apologising fo...

There are almost as many mobile phones on the plant as there are people - surely telephone sales has a role to play based on that statistic alone? The legacy of double glazing, recruitment and advertising sales people has ensured that the reputation of the phone has never been moe tarnished. It's certainly not a panacea but does it still have a place in sales strategies? I think the answer is yes...

Over the last number of weeks I have made some casual references to GlenGarry GlenRoss. Great movie, great acting, poor sales advice. In his book To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink talks about the new ABCs of sales - Attunement, Buoyancy, Clarity. The thing is that whilst the book is brilliant - the new ABCs are not all that new...in fact the same lessons have been around since GlenGarry GlenRoss and m...

I was prompted to record this podcast following the 2020 Oscars with warranted wins for both Joaquin Phoenix and Brad Pitt (amongst others) and their respective outstanding performances - including acceptance speeches. This podcast is based around the 2002 movie, Moneyball, featuring Pitt as the GM of the Oakland Athletics Baseball team and how the introduction of data analytics as a player evalua...

One of the best known and most referenced #sales clips from the movies must be GlenGarry Glenross...if you're in sales you will have seen the clip by Alec Baldwin, if not the entire show. The Anti-Salesman 7 minute piece by Baldwin is superb as is the entire movie, based on the David Mamet play and nominated for a bunch of oscars in 1992. What I talk about in this podcast is the link between the a...

In many sales coaching and sales training sessions we focus on creating a high performance sales team usually siting high performing sports stars and teams. That got me thinking about some of the fundamental differences in HP in sport and also in business - with recovery, mental/ emotional well being and training as areas were there is often no cross over. I have mentioned many sources and referen...

This episode follows a week that included a 20 minute session at a an exhibition at Croke Park. A hugely successful event which saw a lot of people take time out from their busy days generating revenue to spend 2-3 hours at the North Dublin home of the GAA. I learnt a lot this week about high performance in sales against high performance in sport and how important it is to fully understand the lev...

Following a recent conversation with a client, this podcast focuses on 'Commodity Selling' If the sales person creates the narrative that what they are selling is 'just a commodity' then the buyer has it within their gift to immediately talk about price. When the negotiations go straight to price, it becomes almost impossible for the seller to protect that price. The growth of coffee over the last...

Does everyone have a biased viewpoint? How you vote, what you buy, what you read - all of our conventional 'consumer behaviour' is influenced and informed by who we are, our family background, schools, geography, what we read, who we hang out with... How do these biases affect the world view of our business, of our marketing messages, our value propositions and in turn how does that thinking impac...

The first podcast of 2020 - and the first since mid-2019 - focuses on customer retention and the importance of creating value for those customers who helped you achieved targets over the previous 12 months. Stratgic thinking in sales often focuses on acquisition over retention yet the importance of reducing the churn rate in your sales is obvious. The Hegalian dialectic is a writing method (amongs...

The first podcast of 2019 is a solo podcast focusing on sales, media and podcasts. The last few months I have cut out pretty much ALL media from my life and taken control of what I DO listen to....podcasts (Rich Roll, Michael Gervais, Dan Carlin, Irish History, Blindboy Boatclub...and Bill Burr...) Audio books are starting to work for me again and I'm having a go at speed reading...courtesy of Tim...

Marketing has never been more complex than now. Channel proliferation. Social unconformity. Decreasing attention span. Big data. Small data. And then there is the myth of the 'Brand Story.' That is to say the myth that a brand story is anything more than just a poor mans sales pitch. A good brand story stands out for all of the right reasons - check out my podcast with Park Howell Shift Control Ep...

Ireland and in particular Belfast are neither recognised nor acknowledged as centres for excellence when it comes to watchmaking. That may soon change if Hans Enoksen has his way. Serial entrepreneur Enoksen has created a very beautiful brand in Enoksen Watches, collaborating with Big Motive, one of Ireland's digital design studios. After a high profile launch in Belfast in the summer, Enoksen has...

After growing a success web design business in mid 2000s and a product buy-out in 2012, Paul McKeever is back with his latest venture Continually, an online sales/customer service platform that helps businesses manage and assist better, online customer enquires. A serial entrepreneur, with a passion for business and learning, Paul is an exceptional story teller - this podcast is about his journey...

The 3rd time guesting on the podcast, Damian is back on talking about his latest best-selling book, The Barcelona Way, Unlocking the DNA of a Winning Culture. Through the lens of Pep Guardiola and one of the most successful sporting teams in world soccer, Damian gives an insight into what makes an authentic and winning culture within high performing teams - in sport and in business. He shares the...

Episode 29: Stendhal Festival by Shift Control

A high percentage of our work this year has been in training rather than marketing or brand strategy. Over the last number of weeks we have begun work with some major businesses across a variety of sectors, including construction and logistics - both could be considered as bell weather sectors - if they are building and moving then things are ok. When they stop building and moving , there's troubl...