Ever pondered how much your company invests to pay, incentivise, equip and fully mobilise the sales force to deliver the revenue budget they are set?  Ever wondered what impact reducing the investment by 10% would have on the ability to deliver the revenue budget?  What if the revenue budget was increased by 10%….what increase if […]

Ask just about any Head of Sales in B2B corporate Australia about the nature of the relationship between the Sales Execs and their respective customers and you will hear rhetoric about business partnerships and the training, leadership and expenditure invested to move beyond transactionally based sales relationships. Too often, though, once the first layer or […]

Hire for sales attitude and aptitude – not technical knowledge?  Are we witnessing the commencement of the turnaround? When I started my career in sales in the good old days of the mid 80’s, the world for B2B sales organisations and professionals was so, so different to now.  We would not have believed it possible […]

A long standing client of ours asked us about this recently.  Three things were bothering him in terms of productivity and cost-to-mobilise of his own sales team … Are there ways to rebalance our traditional reliance on the face to face visit and the phone, in order to rise above all the noise and clutter […]

Fairly benign question, huh?   As players in the space occupied by Heads of Sales throughout corporate B2B Australia, we would have all been taught a similar principle. And this principle would usually go something like this… An opportunity should be sourced for possible entry into the pipeline, by: applying standard company profile criteria of attractiveness […]

“How can I do my end of month sales forecast for The Exec, when you guys don’t input or update your % probabilities of conversion into your pipeline tracker!”… laments the frustrated Head of Sales to his brow-beaten Sales Execs at the monthly sales meeting. Sadly… a common lament. Yet so many imploring Heads of […]

Thought I would share the bones of a coffee chat I enjoyed with a beloved client a while ago, because the theme of one particular topic seems to crop up on a semi regular basis currently. I reckon that both the consumer and the B2B worlds are going app crazy these days. I am continually […]

Notice lately that the word “optimisation” seems to be creeping into Corporate jargon more and more?  I have – or at least I think I have.  Bit hard for me to tell, because I am heavily biased toward the word.  I am hearing it being used across multiple functions…optimise the collections process; optimising plant resources; […]

So, you have run your annual StO analytics. Thereby, amongst a range of productivity driving outputs, you will have refreshed which customers belong in your top class for targeting, your mid class and your lower class. Putting aside the granularity of the math around your methodology, you should also have essentially produced 3 sub-classes within […]

Four meaty conversations with Heads of Sales last week provoked me to lament that many such sales leaders continue to struggle to reinvent the function of their sales teams to address the permanent change in their customer relationship  world, at this time, now approaching 10 years since the GFC effected that change.  The four chats […]