Buyer beware!  Do a Google search to look for evidence on this sales force effectiveness myth, and you will find a good number of articles that skirt around the issue, and then a few more that border on down right apocryphal.  A set of stats that seems to keep bobbing up, but has no substantial […]

Last week I proposed  that the increasingly commoditised environment for many B2B sales orgs should cause a rethink toward geographic, generalisation of sales team structure and away from the “over-specialisation” that characterised sales team structure in the good old days before the GFC.  For balance, I also argued that, like any such conundrum, there are […]

In a current environment and B2B sales organisation mindset featuring justification pressure on the expensive mobile sales team, it looms as curious to me that the topic of sales team structure seems to lag behind in the debate.  Specifically, in the “good old days” before the GFC, we saw an overplay of the specialisation hand […]

“Don’t worry about the competition.  Worry about, and focus on your customer”.  An old maxim, and true.  To a point.  The annual sales team deployment plan in Oz B2B sales organisation heartland is often a bit thin on a particular aspect of the competitor analysis.  At The Next Level, we call it “position in market” […]

Last week I closed off by provoking that all the sales system development I had described in the previous three parts of this mini-series has the potential to provide a nice value add for your customer that does not necessarily derive added loyalty and commercial returns.  Now this simply cannot be allowed to happen. The […]

Last week I left you contemplating sending your Sales Execs in to see the same customers they have already been visiting…but now they have no product or service from you, the employing company, to offer the client.  How will they continue to add value and command on-going invitation to keep visiting the customer regularly?  Mind […]

Last week I left you dangling on the conundrum that many Oz B2B sales organisations perceive they face nowadays… to question and decrease the investment in and size of the sales team as one mechanism to protect the bottom line as they fight the horrible competitive race to the bottom in their market.  Many of […]

Neil Rackham calls it the most important advance in selling for many years.  Hugh Macfarlane says it has been rocking the sales world since the GFC.  We, at The Next Level, would agree.  Our maxim to any B2B sales professional is that if you have not read the book three times over, you are not […]

Back to last week… and back to our good -> better -> best model for setting up the sales team to garner three possible data points for PV assessment for every customer visited.  “Good” (# of full-time-equivalent practitioners) will compromise accuracy as a PV proxy – but will be attainable by the sales team members […]

Last week I continued the journey of our case study manufacturer selling its products into nationally deployed healthcare practitioners.  For competitively superior customer classification and in-field targeting purposes, they have PV graded each centre on the number of practitioners working within.  This is (only just!) “good”.  More than 90% of centres will feature 1-4 practitioners.  […]