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 [...]

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 [...]

Managers and team members alike can often be observed drawing the convenient conclusion that some recent mishap was simply a communication problem. This conclusion is convenient because, in practice, it’s an excuse to do nothing! After all, aren’t humans (being humans) prone to mis-communication? Now, if you accept that an inability to communicate is a [...]

Here’s a favorite post of mine from our old Yahoo group … Philosophies collide! I was presenting a workshop in Darwin (Australia) recently when the manager of a (government-funded) organization objected that our methods focus only on the financial bottom line — and that they are not conducive with the concept of triple-bottom-line management. Now, [...]

This week I was interviewed by Jim Blasingame on his radio show.  You can listen below (or follow this link: http://tinyurl.com/bk2rpt).  Find interviews with Small Business experts on the Small Business Advocate show Share and Enjoy: Related posts No related posts.