When we work with those manufacturers that sell via resellers of various types, we often encounter an instance of the Drunkard’s Search problem within the sales department. This article describes the problem, as well as a solution we devised around 15 years ago—but abandoned because we believed it was too complex to be practical. Our […]
I’m not joking. The following is precisely how most executives within industrial organizations conceptualize revenue. Q. Where does revenue come from? A. From salespeople. Q. How do salespeople generate revenue? A. Um. From relationships. This conception of revenue is not even vaguely correct. And, unfortunately, this fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of revenue leads to […]
If your business is any more complex than a lemonade stand, it’s likely that you do not need (and should not have) a unified, organization-wide workflow. But what you should have are unified inboxes within each department.
In order to be productive, we do NOT want members of a team to be busy, we want them to be responsive.
Dashboards are all the rage right now. Senior executives, in particular, love the site of a huge monitor, busting with enough colorful charts to put NASA Mission Control to shame. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. But I’m concerned that this kind of display is in danger of giving dashboards a bad […]
Sales is not about personal relationships Salespeople (and other folks who should know better) accept it as a given that sales is all about personal relationships. The problem with this position is that: It’s not generally true. It’s a default assumption that informs the design of most sales environments. However, because it sounds reasonable enough, […]
A common problem our silent revolutionaries face is that they don’t know how to calculate if their new (or reengineered) sales functions are making them money. A worse problem is that they think they know but end up massively under-estimating their performance. Consider this scenario. It’s the end of your calendar year. This year, you started work building a […]
You know, there are two types of people in the world. Those who tolerate complexity, in pursuit of simplicity. And those who revel in complexity, having long forgotten what it is that they’re actually pursuing. I write this a little exhausted, after spending countless hours debating technology, terminology, definitions and process with a parade of […]
Real-time feedback enables miraculous feats! Imagine standing on an overpass watching the traffic on a freeway below. It’s amazing more accidents don’t occur when you consider the number of cars being piloted, at high speed, in such close proximity to one another. Imagine the same scene again without real-time feedback. Imagine you could pull a […]
