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. […]
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 Holy Grail of technical sales: how to disentangle salespeople from production 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 […]
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 […]
We don’t want salespeople writing proposals, simple as that! However, freeing them from proposal generation can be more difficult than it initially appears. The problem is not with minor or major opportunities — there’s an obvious approach for each. It’s the ones in the middle that are the issue! Let’s consider the extremes first. Minor opportunity […]
We have disbelievers in our midst! Among our loyal flock of AdVerb subscribers there are those who profess to embrace our principles but who flout at least one of them conspicuously. I’m referring to those executives who claim to be Relationship-centric Marketing aficionados but who, nonetheless, invest their scarce promotional dollars in golf days, boxes […]
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 […]
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 […]
