Okay, perhaps evil is a bit of an exaggeration, but whenever I encounter an environment where time is tracked and billed, I see tremendous inefficiencies and value-destruction. Let’s consider why. Imagine you have something to sell – a widget, say. Tell me, for how much should you sell it? The answer to that question is [...]

Alejandro Céspedes wrote to me the other day with the following question: Hi Justin Just wanted to ask if you’ve designed a way of managing the sales budget of a company.  In other words, how to review if the salespeople are meeting the budget or not.  Most companies are affected by the end-of-the-month syndrome, and [...]

Today, on Harvard Business Review Online, Peter Bregman argues: why not having a plan can be the best plan of all. Of course, this is just the latest salvo in a long-running battle between the traditionalists – for whom no plan is ever detailed enough – and the now generation – who see planning as [...]

Late last night I was in conference with a potential client in South Africa (I’m in Australia, right now). Towards the end of our conversation, he asked if I thought much market intelligence could be gleaned from customer surveys. I answered (almost instinctively), data, yes; but, intelligence, no. When pressured for a more coherent answer, [...]

Recently I posted a quick-and-dirty guide to process improvement. One particularly difficult question that I skipped over in that post was this one: When you are mapping your workflow, how do you determine the ideal level of granularity?  In other words, how much detail is too much? Conventional wisdom is that: Planning and execution are [...]

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 [...]

As you know, we build a lot of sales processes, here at Ballistix.  You may not know that we build almost as many customer-service teams, inside-sales teams, pre-production teams and even small project teams (in knowledge-based environments). The work we do in these non-traditional (for us) environments is very gratifying and, often times, generates enormous [...]

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 [...]

Your Director of Sales should be charged with the responsibility for maximizing sales, right? Well, maybe not! If he or she is, it might be worth reflecting on what this says about how your critical business functions are resourced. Let’s assume (for simplicity) that your business consists of just two basic functions: Sales Production Ask [...]