Selling features-advantages-benefits has been around since Noah came off The Ark. There can’t be a B2B sales exec around who has not been exposed to some sort of FAB training. But couching the benefit in a way that truly and uniquely connects to the customer’s emotional reality is a skill that few have mastered. One […]

Many of us have found ourselves in the position , selling a technical service , where the successful sales exec (hunter) needs a prerequisite level of technical and industry knowledge that does not come with a crash induction course.  When and how do you justify the addition of another such BDM, with the cost and […]

How do we compare on sales team RoI? Run a very simple litmus test. Take the total revenue budget that you hold the sales team responsible for delivering Apply a cost-of-goods gross margin conversion ($GM) Take your total cost to company to fully mobilise the sales team – fully loaded – wages, super, car, travel […]

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 […]

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 […]

Last post, we lingered on the two broad types  of tier 1 +/- tier 2 customer visits/contacts.  Proactive and responsive visits/contacts.  First focusing on responsive…when the customer initiates contact of a welcome nature, eg a business opportunity.  Here is the rule of thumb.  If the request is a one-off and ad hoc nature, and cannot […]

In the previous two instalments of this post, I prosecuted the importance of visit:drive time ratio for the on-the-road B2B sales team (sales team productivity)…with initial specific focus on the drive time denominator (click here to read the first post in this series), then turning focus to the numerator … visit time (click here to […]

Last week we prosecuted the importance of visit:drive time ratio for the on-the-road B2B sales team…with specific focus on the drive time denominator.  In fact I put out there for your consideration, 8 quick steps to calculate your sales rep/territory managers drive time between customers/prospects (sales team productivity).  Now to the numerator … visit time. […]

For territory based sales reps, visit : drive time ratio SHOULD be a critical kpi and sales team productivity focus.  Sadly, very few B2B sale organisations measure it.  As our cities get bigger and bigger, and our roads get more and more clogged, this metric should be closely monitored for territory mapping and itinerary journey […]