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 […]
Monthly bulletin – Sales team optimisation
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. […]
Fish, where the big fish are! Go for the 80/20! Don’t mess around with the small end of town – spend your time at the big end of town. All laudable exhortations. As a fledgling Sales Exec decades ago, I heard them all. You probably did too, huh? Calls to arms like this aren’t good […]
The term “market” must be just about the most over bandied term in…ironically…marketing. As Sales and Marketers, we use the term…occasionally…when we mean market. Accidentally or with educated intent. We also use it on occasion when we mean customer segment. And sometimes when we mean value chain. And sometimes when we should use the […]
I stopped counting and running ratios a few years back now, but at last count at least 50% of the B2B sales organisations I asked failed the value chain question. I find myself in workshops with heads of Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, Operations seeking clarity from the group in terms of identifying their customers […]
The pendulum swing It has been one crazy year, that’s for sure. Most of us are still figuring out which behavioural impacts on our B2B sales teams arising from the pandemic will become permanent and which ones will be transient. Many sales teams were forced “off the road” for significant periods. The corollary saw […]
Many B2B sales organisations unwittingly set up their Sales Execs for mediocre performance by expecting them, via their charter of role breadth, to cover too much. So how does the organisation set the right breadth of accountabilities for the Sales and Service roles? Well, like many such considerations………..it depends. There is no one universal answer, […]