Management should NOT attempt to impose a fixed sequence of tasks upon salespeople. An attempt to do so will decrease salespeople’s productivity and damage the integrity of information ultimately extracted from CRM.
Have you ever heard a salesperson boast that if they can just get face-to-face with a prospect, their odds of winning the deal jump to 50%? Of course, you have. Pretty much all salespeople make this claim! If we analyze this statement, we discover that it contains an observation that is (most likely) roughly correct.… “Face-to-face visits: when the obvious conclusion is the wrong one!”
The next three chapters deal with opportunities: how to originate them and how to prosecute them. But, as you’ll notice from this chapter heading, we’re not navigating these big subjects in what would appear to be the logical order. There are two (very) important reasons why we’ll be talking about prosecuting opportunities before we talk… “The Machine > Part 2 > Chapter 8: Converting opportunities into sales”
We commence with the direction of the solution (division of labor) and four key principles. On an otherwise blank sheet of paper, we have a single salesperson. Yesterday, our sales function essentially consisted of a single salesperson. Tomorrow, sales will be the responsibility of a tightly synchronized team. Principle 1: centralize scheduling Our first principle… “The Machine > Part 1 > Chapter 3: Re-envisioning the sales function”
How to develop an ideology-based business marketing strategy. So you think you’re going to publish a newsletter? Hey, that’s not a bad idea! If you make it an e-mail newsletter — like the one you’re reading now — it’s a particularly cost effective exercise. Your distribution costs are nil. Your publishing costs are equivalent only… “The importance of ‘getting religion’”
Wastepaper baskets, the world over, are full of them. In fact, if there were ever a competition to judge the most self-indulgent of all business communications, the newsletter would have serious competition from only the corporate video for first place! A tragedy, when you consider that newsletters have the potential to be by far the… “The corporate newsletter: neglected for years, resurrected at last”
At best, most marketing communications are irrelevant to most of their recipients, most of the time. At worst, these communications run the risk of damaging the very relationships they are supposed to be cultivating. The problem is, from a marketing department’s perspective; every relationship looks like a sales opportunity. Accordingly, marketing (and sales) people tend… “From a marketing department’s perspective, every relationship looks like a sales opportunity!”
How to use the virtual world of the Internet to multiply the effectiveness of your real-world marketing activities. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that managing a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business is downright unsexy! Particularly when stories abound of Web entrepreneurs who have reinvented business as we know it (and become… “Clicks and mortar”
How to sell expensive (or complex) products and services [Listen to a seminar on this subject!] If your organisation sells expensive (or complex) products and services, odds are, you get most of your new clients by ‘word of mouth’ or referral. If you’ve tried your hand at lead generation advertising, you’ve probably discovered that, even… “A brief introduction to Relationship-centric Marketing”
As many of you know, I’ve been splitting my time between Australia and the US for the last six months or so. I’ve been interested to see that, although I’ve cut my available capacity in Australia by almost half, our volume of Aussie sales has stayed exactly the same (in fact, in recent times it… “Why you should simplify your engagement model”
