Many of our followers’ salespeople promote an eight-minute briefing when they first engage with prospective customers. Well, I’ve created a video demonstration of an eight-minute briefing—and you can watch it below. Why an Eight-Minute Briefing? First, I should stress that there’s nothing special about eight minutes. It could just as easily be six, or twelve.… “The power of the Eight-Minute Briefing (and a video demonstration)”
This is a must-watch interview for Industrial Distributors. In two short years, Emasal totally reengineered its entire front-of-house. Two years ago they had 6 regional offices, each with its own sales and customer service representatives. And, two years ago, salespeople were commissioned, semi-autonomous operators, doing a mix of field and telephone work. Today, Emasal has… “In the two years it took to centralize sales and customer service, this Central American distributor of packaging machines grew sales at a compound rate of 18%”
Here is a fun and super interesting interview with Devon Gillard. Devon is the CMO of F12.net Inc, which is headquartered in Alberta Canada. F12.net Inc is a fast-growing, private-equity-backed, Managed Service Provider. In short, that means that F12 enables mid-sized organizations to outsource their core technology infrastructure (software and—notably—hardware). As you can see from the… “F12.net Inc grows pipeline by 700% with only 20% of the sales headcount”
Legion Logistics’ growth had stalled at about $27m in annual revenues. It took just three short months to fix that problem. Today, requests-for-quotations (RFQs) are up from 5 to 40 a week and new accounts are up from 2–3 a month to 2–3 a week. My interview with Lacy Starling covers a lot of ground… “In three short months, Legion Logistics has gone from winning 2–3 new accounts a month to 2–3 a week!”
I’m getting tired of battling marketing departments over their irrational devotion to Inbound (and Content) Marketing. It seems that marketing folks can’t help but fall violently in love with these concepts, rendering them useless to the rest of the organization. Here’s my beef. I know, from personal experience, that the content marketing thing works, in… “Inbound Marketing: Retards Growth and Turns Marketing Folks into Zombies”
When Megara – a Melbourne (Australia) based manufacturer of polypropylene products – was contemplating radical changes to the design of their sales function, a list of concerns was identified: Would customers be happy dealing (by phone, rather than face-to-face) with account managers who were located in another region? Would customers tolerate the requirement to interact… “Radical restructure for plastics manufacturer drives costs down and sales activity up”
A little over a year ago, I posted on our initial experiments with “social media” (or, more specifically, with pay-per-click advertising). That post was well received so this one is an update. Actually, it’s more than an update: it’s a review of our entire US lead-generation machine. I hope it provides you an idea or… “Our experiences with Lead-Gen in the USA (a self-liquidating promotional machine)”
If you’re not in the fortunate situation where promotion is easy, then the odds are that it’s really difficult. If you’re in the latter category, this chapter will introduce you to the magnitude of the promotional challenge ahead and explain why (fortunately) moderate success is probably more than sufficient in the early stages of your… “The Machine > Part 2 > Chapter 9: How to generate sales opportunities”
My last post discussing the results of our initial experiments with Social Media elicited a great response, including an invitation to present a webinar for TOCICO. I’ve just created my slide-deck for that webinar and I’m happy to share it below. If you’re interested in attending the Webinar (there is a charge for non-TOCICO members),… “Social Media: update”
Yesterday I shot and produced a short video on forecasting – pitching a booklet we’re in the process of assembling. Aside from the pure entertainment value, this video is notable (I think) for two reasons: It’s an opportunity for me to share the results of some of our experiments with social media It’s an example… “Short video on forecasting and other experiments in social media”
