Two years ago, Roger Andrus, head of the Business Development Corporation of Provo, Utah, ran a little experiment by bringing in a select group of applicants for an intensive, 12-week business mentoring program in conjunction with Griffin-Hill, a respected training organization. The results were startling. Overall, each of the companies represented in the 2010 TechX…

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Driving performance requires accurate and focused measures of performance.  This is especially the case for account development and lead generation teams.  I have recently been interviewing both XANT customers and non-customers (predominantly from the B2B High Tech/Services/Telecom industries) to identify the optimal metric to use when measuring the success of account development reps.  I found that…

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It was a crazy week at Dreamforce. The PowerDialer for Salesforce 3.0 that we rolled out the first day of the conference was an incredible success. The number of inquiries, and the level of interest blew away our expectations.

Now back to the real world.

I have to admit, before Dreamforce, I was getting g little burnt out on the usual sales and marketing blog schtick.

How many different ways can you say, “Align marketing and sales,” or “Create a measurable sales process” before you’re repeating yourself (endlessly….repeating….yourself)?

So today we’re doing something different.

I don’t know anything about Pawel Brodzinski other than he’s a software developer, and he’s Polish . . .

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My biggest takehome from yesterday’s Dreamforce Keynote by Mark Benioff wasn’t the power of the Cloud, Mark’s personality, or the evolution of the salesforce.com platform (though it’s interesting to follow the continued expansion away from purely sales-oriented “stuff” to a broader host of applications). It was the realization that the move to cloud computing as…

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Sitting at our booth at Dreamforce, I’m always amazed at the energy these big conferences bring. It’s a testament to me of the power of human creativity, how we as people are at our best, our most noble, when we are in the act of creation—from steel and silicon to words and ideas. We are…

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Real quick: Found an interesting research analysis by CSO Insight’s Barry Trailer that showed that sales rep quota attainment actually goes up when the ratio of reps to managers goes up. In other words, sometimes we need to avoid the temptation to “over manage” and “over analyze” our sales people and simply let them do…

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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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If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ve probably heard me bring up a company by the name of High-Yield Methods (https://www.h-ym.com) and its founder, Dick Lee.

Dick’s been a top-level business consultant for three decades now, but he’s also an insightful blogger on CustomerThink.com, a voracious researcher, and possessor of a wicked sense of humor.

In his “Another Inconvenient Truth About Lead Management” whitepaper, Dick bemoans that far too many CRM software vendors tell their prospects that CRM will magically take care of their bad lead management and sales processes. His precise words were, I believe, “Yeah right. And Santa Claus still comes down our chimney every year . . . .”

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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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