“Marketing ROI” is a trendy catch-phrase these days, but what does it really mean? While many top managers we speak to think their marketing programs are generating positive results, in reality, most of them don’t really know. Since Marketing’s top priority is to generate qualified leads for Sales, management’s focus should be on measuring the […]
Archive of Posts from August, 2013
The Dark Side of Management: People are Selfish and Greedy
Remember why you came to work today? Was it because you wanted to get started on making your company the best and most highly respected in the nation or the world? Probably not. You came to work today in order to make money to pay the bills and hope that there is a little left […]
Telesales Success: Begin with the End in Mind
You may remember the following excerpt from Steven Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “Clients often ask me, ‘how can we get our inside telesales team to talk to more prospects?’ Sure…threats, begging, yelling, low level torture, coercion, and brut force entice reps to make more calls as long as the manager is […]
Sometimes Team Success is About Harnessing the Power of Self
Voracity is a very powerful emotion that, if harnessed properly, can be both self-serving and profitable for any business. The secret is to find a way to create an environment where selfishness can and will serve two masters. How can that be done? I’m glad you asked! Remember why you came to work today, and […]
Measure Your Marketing ROI
There’s a well-known truism in business: You get what you measure. So if you aren’t measuring the results of your investment in marketing dollars—in terms of current and predicted future revenue and profit results—then essentially you’re investing blindly. Let’s say you follow the established norm for your industry and invest in marketing as a percentage […]
Linking Performance to Company Values
Intel corporate values include risk taking, discipline, and results orientation. These are exactly the values one would expect of a company whose primary strategy is one of product leadership. Without these specific company values the product leadership strategy would surely fail. In firms where the values and the strategy are tested daily it requires management […]
Knocking Down The Ivory Tower
Corporate sales and marketing teams are called upon annually to produce more sales with fewer resources. This is difficult enough when sales and marketing are both in the same location. However, modern sales organizations can span the globe. There is also a greater reliance on channel partners: resellers, distributors, agents, or even franchisees. Channel partners […]
Is it time to hit the reset button on your sales department?
If you’re like most CEOs in business today, you will probably be faced with this decision at some point in the life of your organization. That time might even be now. Perhaps your sales team consistently misses quota or your market share is in decline. Perhaps lethargy and complacency have taken hold in your sales […]
Increase Your Pipeline: Deploying the Cost Effective Sales Team
Based on my talks with local executives, indicators point toward our getting back to business. Many companies that were taking a wait and see stance on Sales are now beginning to once again invest in selling. As we all know from the go-go days, deploying a new sales team takes significant investment, especially if the […]
Hire The Best, Weed Out The Rest: Recruiting Top Sales Producers
Hiring top sales people is the key to accelerating your company’s sales. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Yet even if you agree with this, we all know from experience that finding and attracting high performance sales talent is anything but easy. Getting this right is a combination of both art and science, and requires a […]