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 […]
Monthly bulletin – Sales team optimisation
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, […]
A good sales professional / account manager not only finds new win-win opportunities to sell additional products/services to meet the customer’s evolving needs, but also takes personal accountability as the “go to” point of reference for all issues and problems relating to ordering and delivery of the customer’s requirements. Right, huh? Well like many things……….it […]
The medicos tell us that it is good fundamental health and wellbeing practice to undertake a regular health assessment. You know the stuff…blood pressure, cholesterol, weight: height ratios, lifestyle questionnaires etc – a simple and quick way to ensure our all-important health and wellbeing is on track. The same principles apply to B2B sales organisations. […]
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 […]
What is the current reality telling us about what the next reality will look like for corporate field-based sales teams? For many B2B sales organisations, the first quarter of the current century will be punctuated by two cataclysms. The GFC and …….. now………Corona/Covid19. One of the manifestations for many B2B sales organisations following the GFC, […]
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 […]