Four appointments a day, five days a week Jennifer retrieves her Blackberry from her purse and flicks it free of its protective case in one easy gesture. Moments later, she’s talking to David – her assistant back at head office. “Good meeting,” she answers, “you can go ahead and schedule the RDM. Yep, you can [...]

The Titanic is Sinking All is not well in sales. The sales environment, in a typical organization (most every organization, in fact), is seriously dysfunctional. But rather than focusing on the obvious dysfunction, management is busy with incremental improvement initiatives: Sales training Sales force automation (technology of various types) Bolt-on lead-generation activities (outsourced telemarketing, for [...]

Whenever we work in a technical-sales environment, this – bar none – is the most valuable idea we bring to the table. Here’s the most obvious symptom of the problem: When salespeople make a technical sale, they inevitably become entangled with production. Their involvement in production cannibalizes their (already limited) business-development capacity – leading to [...]

If you didn’t get a chance to participate in last week’s conference call, you can listen to a recording of this call below. It’s an introduction to Sales Process Engineering (45-minute introduction to SPE, and 15 minutes of question time). This event was hosted by Constraints Management Group. It’s a preview of my two sessions at [...]

As you may already know, I’m speaking this year at the Constraints Management Group’s annual conference (CMUC2010) in April. CMG has organized for me to present a one-hour conference call on the afternoon of April 8 (US) for their clients and friends – and for anyone else who’d like to attend! It’s free. And it [...]

Why you should never have bought the damn thing. (And why you should probably keep it.) A CRM seemed like such a great idea, didn’t it? The rest of the organization had reaped such enormous rewards from automation, and the sales process was certainly in need of productivity improvement. So why is it that the [...]

Here’s a useful exercise. Calculate your market size.  But, instead of calculating total revenues or total unit sales, try calculating total face-to-face, business-development meetings (FTFBDM). Imagine you wish to determine the optimal size for your sales team. The normal approach is to start with one of the standard measures of market size (revenues or unit [...]

Unlike Australia, the United States is the land of the ‘Manufacturer’s Representative’. Most manufacturers rely on a network of independent representatives to provide distribution across this huge continent.  (Australia is a huge continent too, but only small areas of it are populated.) A typical manufacturer’s representative (Rep) is essentially a commissioned salesperson who promotes the [...]

Early next year, we’ll running a special promotion (a competition, in fact) around our new online Sales Process Engineering ROI calculator (pictured on left). More about the competition in a moment. This promotion will be directed to the 60,000+ executives on our house database. But, here’s an opportunity to preview that calculator (and perhaps get a [...]

It seems so obvious. If that team member has a Blackberry and a company car; if they call on customers and help resolve their problems; then they must be a salesperson, right? Well, maybe not! Sure, that’s the way things have traditionally been done: the person in the field is automatically the salesperson. But, in [...]