Noise and Distraction Now that on-the-road B2B sales teams are back on the road, we are starting to hear about a return of the old noise and distraction that blighted productivity pre-Covid. The problem is often confounded by hearsay re what and which noise drivers consume most time and the what and how surrounding the […]
Monthly bulletin – Sales team optimisation
Lets assume you fall into the 80/20 rule and find yourself amongst the majority B2B sales organisations, ie you sell your widgets or wares down a channel to an end user/consumer via a dominant player in between in the form of a wholesaler or distributor. And subsequently, you only have partial “line of sight” on […]
How to backfill your incomplete customer base “current value” and “potential value” data… The cornerstone of customer targeting for any B2B on-the-road sales team is good data. From over 150 sales team optimisation assignments spanning c25 years, we have never yet seen a sales organisation with a full set of accurate and up to […]
In the B2B environment where core products and services are becoming more and more commoditised, more often than not, customers make their supplier choices on the process outputs that are most tangible and visible to them…………as suppliers, we live and die daily by the output performance of these critical and inter-related processes, as perceived by […]
We often hear The Marketing Manager bemoan ….. “ I know that of all I invest in advertising and promotion, only half works…………..wish I could say with confidence which half”. Whilst we don’t seem to hear or read about it as much, I think it fair to say that the Sales Manager’s counterpart lament would […]
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 […]
It costs seven times the blood, sweat, tears and dollars to win a brand new client as it does to maintain an existing client. Heard that one before? A million times, I bet. This old adage has become so oft trotted out that most of us no longer even know where or who started it. […]
We at The Next Level began our journey back in 2004. From our narrowly defined window into the corporate sales world, much has changed over the 17 years. The numbers are hard to come by, but by our rough ‘n’ ready reckoning, there are around 40,000 corporate B2B sales teams across Australia. For every such […]
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 […]
Itinerary routing for your on-the-road sales team Sales teams are returning to the road, as we emerge from the worst of the pandemic. This is a great time and opportunity to review how this is done in your sales organisation, and the degree to which you let the sales team members determine it for themselves. […]