Last week I reminisced about the chat I had recently with “John”, my erudite Head of Sales from ABC Industries selling product through a channel structure into the Agri-sector.  We meandered our way onto the classic sales team productivity topic of visit design.   Against the backdrop of rising costs to mobilise a professional B2B territory […]

“How long are your Sales Execs spending on average in their visits with Tier 1 customers, John”? “Oh, it depends Glenn”, responds one of my most respected Head of Sales from a B2B sales organisation selling into the agri-sector.  “It depends what the customer wants, what we want the Execs to do during the cycle, […]

The question I posed last week is both simplistic in expectation of a black and white answer, as it is a real world challenge for many B2B sales organisations. Naturally, as real world practitioners, you know that the answer is that it can’t be as simple as one before the other.  Both need to be […]

“Yes, Glenn!  I hear you! And I am not disagreeing.”  My erudite prospect was being firm in mitigating my bubbling over passion as I envisaged and then articulated how much the organisation’s sales could improve with the establishment of a tailored sales system (the company is a large branch network B2B distributor) and some sales […]

Last week I lingered on the notion that the alignment of your valuable sales team resource to the relevant segments of players in the value chain (making the best bets) is one of the key considerations at the cusp of where sales strategy ends and sales optimisation begins. The way we “see the world”, making […]

Last week I proposed that a clear set of succinct deliberations in regards to a robust  Go-to-market model (click here to view again) will serve two purposes ……… the heart and soul of your sales (go-to-market) strategy, with a special focus on your sales team function and utilisation …… and the perfect starting point (set […]

The recent publication “12 sales trends for 2014 : The year of the thinking sales organisation”  tells us (sales trend #10) that sales strategy will become the hot discipline of business in 2014 and beyond.  The same report also identifies no less than 5 of the other 11 sales trends that, for those of us […]

These guys put the fun and the challenge into the relative dryness of their annual sales team optimisation discipline.  How?  They converted the necessary sales territory planning calculations and exercises into a “bootcamp” style series of challenges.  Once in the bootcamp environment, they grouped the Sales Execs into small teams ……….where each member worked on […]

Over recent weeks I have floated the notion that most Australian B2B sales organisations struggle to profile their customer base, top to bottom, with good profiling data that can be used to assess the potential value of each customer against each other, as vital input to sales team targeting. And what so-called gold standard PV […]

Last week I floated the notion that most Australian B2B sales organisations struggle to profile their customer base, top to bottom, with good profiling data that can be used to assess the potential value of each customer against each other, as vital input to sales team targeting. And what so-called gold standard PV data looks […]