Boxing Day Sales in New Zealand are just like Black Friday in the States. Nigel is hitting them up, but I'm opting out this year for a game of croquet instead. Happy Boxing Day! Danny p.s. The Boxing Day article is worth a read. To View More >>

I always enjoy Tom Fishburne's Brand Camp, and his latest cartoon makes a timely point. We've just finished Queensberry "Sales Week", where we we bring together our Account Managers and Support People from round the world to talk with the Design and IT teams, the Bindery, the Lab and Order Processing - and to each other of course. Like many of our clients, some of our people work alone most of the time and they enjoy the chance to mix it up. If that's the right expression – actually I admire the way everyone works so well together! But it's hard work for them. I was with them for a day, and To View More >>

Alan (not his real name) and his wife were long-standing clients of one of our competitors. They came to us because they didn't like the way they'd been treated. Unlike Katherine, who likes us (even if she's frustrated), we haven't earned anything from Alan and his wife except a chance to win their business. Alan's customers really like our Duos, which of course they couldn't get before, but he finds designing and ordering them difficult. Alan designs them on paper and his wife recreates them in Remix. Alan's designs are reasonably complex, his wife is a fan of her old software (which can't To View More >>

Three points! 1. Investigate and determine your clients needs, limitations, and dreams. 2. Establish design objectives. 3. Exceed your clients' expectations. We set the parameters of size, style, and content from discussions with our client prior to the wedding. Having a series of questions to answer on a sheet means you get the information you need. Album type, size, and budget are the first questions. Then how many albums and what these would do. We gauge their response to our sample albums and ask questions about what might be important. We define the style by giving them a key description To View More >>

I was upsold to in the weekend and didn't even know it. Now that I do though, I'm ok with it. Over the last few weeks my fiancee and I have been looking out wedding bands for us both. We'd again done our homework, been put off by another raft of useless sales people and ended up where we always knew we would, with the same jeweller I'd bought her engagement ring from. I blogged about that experience a while back. An hour later I walked out of the shop with a quote for a wedding band thicker, wider, with a bigger diamond and in higher quality gold than I'd gone in thinking I wanted. Kayla made To View More >>