In praise of the cheatsheet

You're an artist! A professional! What would you need a cheatsheet for? Personally, I couldn't live without them. By my desk I always have a cheatsheet for each of the three types of prospects I get contacting me. On that sheet are the top 3-5 questions I should ask, along with the key relevant facts about the service I sell. Plus, there are reminders about the boring stuff, “Name, phone, email!”.

I would say that 90% of the time I do little more than glance at it, but it's main payoff is the confidence it gives me : it's there if I need it and on the occasion I am caught off-guard it's a huge help. I say, don't be afraid to cheat.

Mind Mapping for Sales

I would guess that most sales people out there would agree that one of the challenges of selling today is the large amount of information we have to gather, master and recall at the drop of a hat. For example, information on products, competitors, our company, accounts/customers, your prospects’ industry.

I came across Mind Mapping about 2 years ago. It’s a great way of arranging masses of small bits of information for quick recall. It takes you out of the limitations of a linear Word document, for example, and allows you to shift around and position information in a way that suits you. I wanted to show you one of mine, but I have none without confidential information on them, but here’s an example mindmap from Flickr.

With good software it’s searchable and colour code-able. You can even do it offline, the old fashioned way, with a pen and paper! What a thought!

My experience is that some people love it and find it very useful, and some people hate it. I have found it most useful for creating company profiles and planning campaigns/projects.

For free mindmapping software try Freemind :

For the whizzbang top of the range try MindManager

And there are loads of other options here.