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Monthly Archives: July 2010
Marketing and Sales – The Power of Narrative and Storytelling
What’s the story—the real story—of your business?
I’ll tell you what it’s not:
It’s not the one on your “About Us” page on your company Web site. Not the generic, voiceless, lifeless biographies of your CEO/CIO/CTO/CFO/CMO.
It’s not the marketing blurbs and buzzwords your sales people use every single day.
It’s not the operations metrics, the TPS reports or financial statements . . . .
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View Comments (3) Inside Sales Tips – No Vacations the Last Week of the Month
The message of this post is pretty simple: Managers and reps should never schedule vacations during the last business week of the month. I’m sure some of you—most likely front-line sales reps—growled a little bit at hearing that. On the
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Inside Sales Tips – Skip to the Beep
I learned an awesome phone skill from one of our lead gen reps at the office this morning. Travis Turner is a lead generation superstar, and I mean that in every sense. He’s been with our company close to three
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Truth, Social Media, and Translating Barking Dogs Into Hindu
I don’t really like Social Media.
There.
I said it.
Is that a bad thing to say for someone whose primary job is creating marketing content?
My TweetDeck runs for many hours a day. It blurbs little blurbs, it tweets little tweets, and I ignore most of them.
Social Media attracts a lot of schemers, hucksters, and shills because it sounds “easy” . . . .
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Sales Management – “Hello, Massive Disconnect? This is Your Friend, Crappy Performance.”
I bumped into this post on The New Sales Economy, and thought it was a worthwhile read on inside sales best practices (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi for the link). Using The Bridge Group’s data, author Chad Levitt asks nine highly
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Inside Sales Best Practices – Kill the “Sunny Day Salary”
Time Waster #3 of our classic 15 Time Wasters of Marketing and Sales is what I call “Sunny Day Salaries.”
A “Sunny Day Salary” is a pay plan or commission structure that can only be met when “every single star falls into alignment.”
When every decision maker acts exactly the way we expect, when every sale goes according to plan.
As long as there’s no obstacles, no off-the-wall objections, as long as “Everything’s bright and sun-shiny,” the sales rep can meet their quota, and earn their performance bonus.
As every sales rep knows, real life doesn’t work this way.
Ever.
To wit: . . . .
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Lead Management – JS Bach, Music, and Your Sales Pipeline
I absolutely loved this recent post by Copyblogger. As someone who took piano lessons for over eight years, I’ve played my fair share of Bach minuets, and hearing about the sheer amount of effort he put into creating his music inspired me.
And I think there’s a lesson to be learned here that’s eminently applicable to sales:
“Researchers concluded that the rate of [musical composition] hits to misses was pretty constant between major and minor composers. The truly great composers produce more masterpieces than the others, mainly because they produced more work overall.”
Change “musical composition” to “prospects,” and “masterpieces” to “sales” and suddenly we’re on to something.
You want to know one of the secrets of the top sales people? The agents in the “20 percent” category of the “80/20 Rule of Sales” (i.e., “80 percent of all sales are generated by 20 percent of the reps”)?
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