Company News

October 2023

In a chance from what I typically do, I am working for Lite RADIO to sell advertising for them. This is a classic sales role but not one that I have ever done before. Lite RADIO is a regional radio station for the South East of England, playing a variety of easy listening favourites from the 60s through to today.

Did you know that according to RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research), just under 90% of the UK's population listen to the radio on a weekly basis? Lite RADIO is attracting 45,000 weekly listeners, based on the breakdown of digital listening through RAJAR.

AS Lite RADIO is still relatively new, they cannot afford regular commission payments so part of my payment is in radio advertising! My advert is already being played on air and you can listen to it here:

April 2023

I am delighted to announce that my free training course specifically for charities is returning this year!  Presentation Skills for Charities teaches you how to make great presentations that persuade your audience to support your charity.  This training course is designed specifically for Fundraising Managers and Corporate Partnership Managers who are responsible for promoting charities to organisations to secure long-term relationships for their charity.  These roles require great presentation skills as well as the ability to persuade.  Like all skills, presenting confidently requires training and practise.  This course will provide the participants with the knowledge of how to build a great presentation and the time to practise it in a safe environment.

Reigate and Banstead Borough Council have kindly offered us a room at no cost to provide this training so the course remains free to attend for all participants.  The course lasts for one day and will run three times in 2023.  Full details can be found at https://www.hoolock-consulting.com/presentation-skills-for-charities.

You can book a place via https://www.hoolock-consulting.com/charity-registration

March 2023

I’m very excited to announce that my podcast has finally been published!!  It is called Solving The Equation of Sales.  Its primary purpose is to help anyone who is new to sales to be more effective in their role but I am sure that it will be interesting and useful to anyone who is working in sales.

There is a lot to learn for anyone who is new to sales.  This podcast is a mixture of chat, ideas and training that can help you to improve your sales performance and close more deals.  You will learn from me and my guests about the things that they have learnt over their careers that can help you as you start your career in sales.

The podcast is available on all good podcast sites including Apple and Spotify. All episodes are available here:

https://solvingtheequationofsales.buzzsprout.com/

September 2022

Catalyst for Sales – NEW Sales Training Course

Imagine that you bought a dishwasher and then continued to wash all of your dishes by hand.  You would be likely to consider the purchase a waste of money.  You need to change the processes you have for washing dishes to take advantage of the benefits provided by the dishwasher.  You first need to understand what you will do with the time that you save by having the dishwasher before you can justify the decision to buy one.

Any purchase like this requires us to change our processes in order to take advantage of it.  This is fairly simple to understand for a dishwasher.  However, for more complex business purchases, this may not be so obvious.  When presented with a new product, the first question that any customer will ask is likely to be “How will this change my processes?”  Unless they understand this, then they cannot commit to a purchase.

As a result, the first action for any sales person is to help their customer to understand why they need to change.  Only once they have sold the reason to change, can then sell their product.  This requires sales to change their approach to customers.

Catalyst for Sales is a 2 days sales training course that approaches sales from this perspective.  It looks at change, why it is difficult and how we can go about making a successful change.  It then teaches delegates how to achieve this with their customers. 

Before taking this course, sales teams will typically have lots of opportunities that struggle to get beyond the first few customer meetings.  They will feel frustrated at the lack of progress that they are making.

By taking this course, the team will be able to identify the reasons for change within their target accounts, be able to explain the value of those changes to their customer and be able to progress opportunities more rapidly to a conclusion. 

For more information, please visit www.catalystforsales.com

May 2022

Recently I worked with Olivia-Louise Hamilton of Changing Minds Training to help her to develop a presentation for a Dragon’s Den type pitch at Sussex Business Show.  We spent a few hours building the structure and content of the pitch and then a further couple of hours refining it. 

Despite the difficult setting for the presentation, a sectioned off area of the exhibition but completely open to noise, she did a great pitch and she was awarded the Best Pitch Award.  The judges commented

“Her pitch, background and reason for doing what she is passionate about resonated with each of us. Her drive is incredible and by far was our favourite on the day. So, a very well done!”

Olivia commented “Tim, you've been wonderful and I couldn't have done it without your support and guidance. Thank you so much!”

January 2022

We have just launched our monthly newsletter sent to everyone who has subscribed or shown interest in our services. The newsletter contains sales news, sales tips, typical customer problems and how to solve them and other articles that we hope are of interest.

You can sign up to receive it here. You can also read back copies here.

November 2021

We are very excited to launch the Hoolock Sales Training School. This online school provides short courses for professionals to learn and develop new sales skills that will improve their performance. There are currently three courses available including a free sales course called The Equation of Sales.

To access the course, please go to https://hoolock-consulting.teachable.com.

September 2021

On 7th September, we will be exhibiting at the Grow Your Business Show (https://www.growyourbusinessshow.co.uk/) at Epsom Race Course. Not only that, Tim Gibbons is giving a talk in Seminar Room 1 at 10.40 titled “Building an efficient sales process to deliver business growth”. This should be a lot of fun, especially as no one has met anyone else for 18 months and spoken in public for even longer!

At the show, Tim will be promoting his book, The Equation of Sales, and there will be an opportunity to buy a copy from the stand. We hope to see you there!

August 2021

At the start of 2020, Hoolock Consulting committed to offsetting the carbon cost of all of our flights by donating to The Woodland Trust (https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/) which plants trees to help to combat climate change. We typically flew 8-10 times each year and expected to donate about £150 over the year.

Of course, thanks to the pandemic, we flew twice in 2020 and not at all so far in 2021! So far, we have donated £40. However, the commitment remains and we will continue to offset the carbon cost of any flight that we take and from 2022 we will include road and rail travel in the calculation.

This year, we came across the SME Climate Hub (https://smeclimatehub.org/). This provides a one-stop-shop for small and medium-sized businesses to firstly make a commitment to reducing emissions and secondly access a great variety of tools and resources. These resources provide support in regards to developing your climate strategy and measuring and reducing your emissions.

We have signed The SME Climate Commitment which states that: Recognising that climate change poses a threat to the economy, nature and society-at-large, our company commits to take action immediately in order to:

1. Halve our greenhouse gas emissions before 2030

2. Achieve net zero emissions before 2050

3. Disclose our progress on a yearly basis

In doing so, we are proud to be recognised by the United Nations Race to Zero campaign, and join governments, businesses, cities, regions, and universities around the world that share the same mission.

While we are only a small company and have very little impact, we believe that this is an important pledge and will work to ensure that we deliver on our pledge.

It’s Here!

19th November 2020

On Thursday 19th November, we published The Equation of Sales. This is a practical guide to selling technology. It is the distillation of more than 20 years of sales experience into practical tools for people selling technology or technical services. The book will help you to understand how to establish trust with your customer, how to identify their needs and how to demonstrate the value of your product. As a result, you will make more sales and earn more commission! It comes with an exercise / example book for your to practise new ideas and additional books on Presentation Skills and Sales Negotiations.