If your business is any more complex than a lemonade stand, it’s likely that you do not need (and should not have) a unified, organization-wide workflow. But what you should have are unified inboxes within each department.
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This article was first published on Thomasnet.com. You can read the original here. Your salespeople are NOT short of leads! If you hear a crazy idea often enough, there’s a danger that you’ll come to passively accept it — particularly if it’s on the periphery of your primary interest area. Some of these ideas (think, astrology)… “Fuelling Growth: The abundance of leads in industrial sales”
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This article was first published on Thomasnet.com. You can read the original here. If you make revenue the responsibility of your sales department, you will handicap the growth of your organization. If you want your organization to grow, operations should be responsible for revenue and your sales department should focus exclusively on new business. Before… “Revenue Should Always Be the Responsibility of Operations, Never Sales”
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In order to be productive, we do NOT want members of a team to be busy, we want them to be responsive.
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Management should NOT attempt to impose a fixed sequence of tasks upon salespeople. An attempt to do so will decrease salespeople’s productivity and damage the integrity of information ultimately extracted from CRM.
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Have you ever heard a salesperson boast that if they can just get face-to-face with a prospect, their odds of winning the deal jump to 50%? Of course, you have. Pretty much all salespeople make this claim! If we analyze this statement, we discover that it contains an observation that is (most likely) roughly correct.… “Face-to-face visits: when the obvious conclusion is the wrong one!”
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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””
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Dashboards are all the rage right now. Senior executives, in particular, love the site of a huge monitor, busting with enough colorful charts to put NASA Mission Control to shame. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. But I’m concerned that this kind of display is in danger of giving dashboards a bad… “The incredible power of a single number, carefully selected”
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Sales is not about personal relationships Salespeople (and other folks who should know better) accept it as a given that sales is all about personal relationships. The problem with this position is that: It’s not generally true. It’s a default assumption that informs the design of most sales environments. However, because it sounds reasonable enough,… “Mistruths, salespeople’s personal relationships and crashing the schedule”
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