(The organization’s requirements have radically changed, but everyone’s too scared to break the news to the sales department!) Walk into almost any B2B company today and you’ll find a sales department that looks and behaves pretty much as it did in the 1950s. The same job descriptions, the same compensation plans, the same lone-wolf operating… “Rethinking the Salesperson’s role”
(And why you need to stop pretending that your sales team is driving growth.) Here’s a choice that you don’t want to make. Do you want a happy sales team or a fast-growing business? I’m sure you’d like to say “both” and reject my implication that these options are mutually exclusive. But they are: so… “How to sell when no one picks up the phone”
The optimal strategy for the prisoner’s dilemma depends on whether you play the game once (defect) or multiple times (cooperate). When it comes to management decisions, cost allocation makes sense if used for a single decision, but it dramatically reduces the organization’s profitability when used across multiple decisions. This is because the impact of a… “Cost accounting has something interesting in common with the prisoner’s dilemma.”
Investors talk about capital-efficient businesses. That kind of efficiency is good. But, when managers use the word efficiency, they’re referring to components of the larger business. And that’s bad. If you optimize the efficiency of each component of your business, you strip protective capacity out of your organization, causing it to become both slow and… “The pursuit of efficiency is making your organization slow, fragile, and less profitable than it otherwise could be.”
A number of Marketing folks would have you believe that inbound leads (or sales opportunities) are superior to outbound. (They generally are.) And that inbound (or content) marketing is virtuous and outbound is primitive and disreputable. (This position is pretty much as silly as it sounds!) I’ve pointed to problems with the definition of “inbound”… “Why you probably want fewer than 30% of your leads to be “inbound””
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… “Marketing: Inbound vs Outbound is a False Alternative”
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… “If you really like wasting money and annoying prospects then, go ahead, hire a team of Sales Development Reps for your Industrial Sales Company”
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… “Inbound Marketing: Retards Growth and Turns Marketing Folks into Zombies”
I love webinars and, increasingly, our clients are learning to love them too! In this post I’ll share some of our experiences with webinars over the last 7 months and show you why we’re so enthusiastic about them. The results In a previous post, I told you how we build our list (generate new relationships). … “The wonder of webinars (our stats revealed)”
If you’re not in the fortunate situation where promotion is easy, then the odds are that it’s really difficult. If you’re in the latter category, this chapter will introduce you to the magnitude of the promotional challenge ahead and explain why (fortunately) moderate success is probably more than sufficient in the early stages of your… “The Machine > Part 2 > Chapter 9: How to generate sales opportunities”
