It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on this blog, mostly because I’ve been knee-deep in doing research, and working with a couple of clients. But I’ve decided to post today to talk specifically about one particular experience talking to a client about how much the XANT system had made a difference in their sales performance.

SEO business optimization experts OrangeSoda improved individual sales rep performance 300%, and started seeing three times the monthly number of account closes.

But just as much as the productivity gains (which I was naturally gratified to hear about), something else stuck out to me, which was that even before they started using the XANT system, they were doing a lot of things right. They had a good system in place to acquire leads and close sales. They had a great management team that had developed a scalable, repeatable process.

The problem was they simply hadn’t fully learned yet that most sales are won and lost at the top of the sales funnel, not the bottom. It’s not that their pipeline was non-existent or stagnant. They simply weren’t getting the results they could have been because they hadn’t put enough focus on the lead qualification process . . . .

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As a football coach for a city league team of 13-year-olds, I came across a very interesting statistic over the weekend. Want to know what the difference between success and failure in the NFL? It’s one yard. It’s the difference between having a 2nd down and 5, versus 2nd down and 6. An NFL offense…

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Sales Technology Failure

It’s pretty simple: In three and a half years doing client services in the sales software space, here’s the Top Five Things I’ve found that will kill even the most promising sales automation purchase.

1. The true value of the system is never made apparent.

Forcing people to use new software or systems is certainly a management right, but an effective sales tool must appeal to the reps by solving immediate pains, and by making it easier for them to stay organized and keep promises to their customers and co-workers.

It has to provide better sales intelligence (data), improve speed and efficiency (automation), or heighten overall employee impact (training and process development), or employees simply tune out . . . .

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A lot of companies struggle with bad data. They don’t have enough of it, or if they do it’s out of date, not well-organized or both. As Trish Bertuzzi with The Bridge Group stated last week in an excellent blog post,

“Bad data is probably handicapping your team by at least 25%.”

“Your email campaigns are bouncing, your LeadGen & Sales Reps are spending time looking for the right guy and all this is adding up to a lot of non-selling time.”

But even if you’re actively managing the data, do you have the right metadata analysis to make it useful?

In simple terms, metadata is “data about data” . . . .

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