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, […]
I criticized the religion of Inbound Marketing in a previous post. Inbound Marketing: Retards Growth and Turns Marketing Folk into Zombies. I complained that marketing folk were swallowing the dogma and failing to recognize the practical limitations of inbound (or content) marketing. But what I didn’t address are two deeper points: Inbound vs outbound is […]
It’s all the rage nowadays. Build a team of Sales Development Reps (or SDRs) to multiply the productivity of your salespeople. Thing is, as anyone who’s watched Boiler Room knows, this is not exactly a new idea. Boiler Room features a New York bucket shop that uses a call center and high-pressure sales techniques to […]
I’m getting tired of battling marketing departments over their irrational devotion to Inbound (and Content) Marketing. It seems that marketing folks can’t help but fall violently in love with these concepts, rendering them useless to the rest of the organization. Here’s my beef. I know, from personal experience, that the content marketing thing works, in […]
As I write, I’m flying back to LA after attending the Inside Sales Professionals annual conference in Chicago. Today, I presented The Death of Field Sales, an introduction to our inside-out approach to the design of the sales function. Here are my observations on state of the inside-sales community. The good First, inside sales is […]
If it’s true that sacred cows make the best hamburgers, then we’re in for quite a feast! I’ve chosen to close Part One of this book with a frontal assault on the juiciest bovine of all: the unassailable belief that salespeople should be paid commissions. And while I’m at it, I’ll take aim at bonuses, […]
Case study: Bas Sol, Perth (Australia) If you are a professional-services firm – or if you track and bill time – I think you’ll find this video very interesting. It’s an interview I conducted just before Christmas with Rosie Davidson, the CEO of Bas Sol, a Perth (Australia) based accounting and bookkeeping firm. I must […]
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 […]
