Posts Tagged ‘sales performance’
“Aligning the Alignment” – 4 Ways of Increasing Sales (and Connecting Them to Marketing)
Somewhere between 2008 and today, the phrase “Aligning Sales and Marketing” went from hot topic to overused buzzword. The last year especially it’s been discussed ad nauseum: online, in print, during webinars, trade shows, executive meetings . . . the list goes on. But as Adam Needles at Propelling Brands reports, a 2010 research study…
Read MoreOptimal Metrics for Lead Generation
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…
Read MoreTechnology Isn’t a Sales Strategy
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 . . . .”
Read MoreSales Performance – Mind Power and Dictating Outcomes
When that guy on the freeway nearly ran you into the median the other day (or maybe it was this morning)—were you angry or matter-of-fact about the situation?
Were you screaming obscenities, or was it a more pragmatic, “Hmm, it’s too bad that he’s driving dangerously; I really wonder why he’d put himself at risk like that”?
When it rains does it depress, or captivate you?
When a prospect doesn’t show up to an appointment, is it because they’re an idiot, or because they’re a business professional with exceptional demands on their time, who needs and deserves your best work, your best effort to help them?
The answer is, of course, it’s a choice. Your choice . . . .
Read MoreSales Performance and the Price of Fish
Loved a recent post by the self-proclaimed “A Sales Guy” talking about the fact that when a sale focuses on price, it’s because the relative value surrounding the price has no context.
Take, for example, two salmon fillets, one $6.00 a pound, one $9.50. Same size, same weight. All things being equal, you take the cheaper of the two, right?
But what if the $6.00 / pound fillet was raised in a fish farm with 10,000 other salmon and artificially enhanced—and the $9.50 / pound fillet is freshly caught, true Alaska Salmon?
The context controls the value here . . . .
Read MoreCliche or Truth (or Both) — Better Sales Performance Means Fighting the Right Battle
It’s absolutely cliche, but one of the things people most often ask me when I’m consulting is, “What’s the #1 thing I can do to make more sales today, tomorrow, and next week (as opposed to next month, next quarter, next year)?” Usually they ask thinking that I’m going to give them some killer pitch…
Read MoreSales Motivation – The Metaphor of “Jerry Maguire”
Every semester for two years while teaching college composition, I used an excerpt from the movie script for Jerry Maguire to emphasize the key point of writer ethos.
Classically defined, ethos is the persona, or appearance, of a writer or orator to their audience—the words they chose, the emotional voice and tone, the sense of authority the speaker projects.
Parts of the film haven’t aged well since the mid-’90s, but there’s an essential essence that still resonates, a part of the human experience that it manages to capture. The movie at its heart wasn’t a story about sports, or even love; it was a story about a human being coming to realize the power of humility, self-actualization, and integrity.
The metaphor for the entire film becomes Jerry’s journey to Kinkos at 3:00 AM to make a hundred copies of a mission statement he had just written because he knew, KNEW that it was that damn important, and that he’d never be able to look himself in the mirror again if he didn’t do something about it.
The story rings true because we recognize something about the character in ourselves; the person who sees that the real path to success lies in everything that they aren’t.
And for some reason, even in the midst of the Digital Age Sales 2.0 world, we still haven’t gotten the message . . . .
Read MoreBetter Sales Management, Performance Starts with “Scrappy”
If you’ve read my “15 Time-wasters of Inside Sales and Marketing,” you’ve heard me say that one of the biggest culprits of poor sales performance and poor motivation is having a bad sales manager. And if you’ve read my “15 Time Wasters,” you’ve also heard me say that regardless of where they come from or…
Read MoreInside Sales: Two Hidden Metrics of Prospecting That are Hurting Your Sales
Most of the common marketing and sales and metrics—click-throughs, impressions, sales cycle, revenue per deal—don’t really need an explanation. But there are two metrics where a lot of companies we’ve worked with have holes in their sales process.
How soon after a new Web lead comes in does a sales rep make the first contact attempt, and how long after it came in did they actually make contact? Every single piece of data we’ve ever researched shows that for Web-generated leads, immediate response is crucial . . . .
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