We’ve had a lot of clients express the desire for a short-term sales boost, and our canned response is that there are few levers you can pull besides price to increase sales in the next 30-90 days. You can read more about that here and here. Oddly enough, we’ve also heard of companies with the exact opposite problem – the sales department is crushing it so hard that production and engineering can’t keep up. Sales is often pressured to “slow down” by [...]
Outsourcing: To many, this is the dirtiest of dirty words – implying the shipping of jobs overseas, forcing customers to deal with service reps who don’t understand English and profits over people. Outsourcing has a very negative image. The core philosophy of outsourcing isn’t a bad thing – to address internal limitations by employing an outside firm that can shoulder the responsibility. It’s often a lower-cost solution that adds value to products, improves customer experience and ultimately grows top-line revenue. Outsourcing business [...]
Hiring a new salesperson and having them work their first opportunities through the sales funnel takes time, but how much time? The answer may surprise you – especially if you are in a leadership position. We’ve been studying the performance of new sales hires for years, and we’ve found huge differences between when leadership thinks those strategies will affect the balance sheet and when they actually do. With complex sales, it often takes 6-9 months for new sales efforts to turn into income. On the [...]
You've scripted the perfect PowerPoint, assembled some magnificent imagery for your slides, and you've out the invites to your online presentation. The only thing you need to do now is show up and press start, right? WRONG! Online sales presentations are only effective if you've done your best to eliminate all potential issues you could encounter in the virtual conference room. We've all been looped into really bad online presentations, and they are more frustrating than informative. If you want to keep [...]
Here’s the scenario: Your company fell short on sales goals and top-line revenue is way down. Your expenses are greater than your earnings. It’s time for some tough financial decisions, and the most obvious choice is to cut expenses. But is it the right choice? From a financial perspective, making cuts can be a good thing if they part of a long-term growth strategy, but making cuts to achieve short-term profitability is a huge mistake! Here’s why: Random cuts can hamper long-term [...]
Focus on the short-term can kill long-term growth Sometimes you must be the bearer of bad news. We are often asked, “what can we do now that will increase our sales this quarter?” Unfortunately, for most businesses, the answer is, “Not much.” Sales cycles are long and getting longer. Successes today are often the result of actions taken 3-9 months ago. And, while short-term solutions sometimes yield results, the success of a short-term push is usually insignificant when compared to the long-term opportunity. [...]
If making a lot of money in sales was easy, then everyone would be doing it. These ten things separate the winners from the losers in sales.
Television personality Jon Stewart once said, “The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.” One quick look at Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Angie’s List or any of the websites on seemingly endless list of places one can express an opinion, and you can see Stewart was on to something. Here’s the scary thing, though, some of these notes are about you! Yep, it’s high school all over again, but here’s the difference: you can actually control those messages! Right [...]
In a July 6, 2016 New York Times column, writer Farhad Manjoo highlighted a quote from “Future Shock,” the 1970 book by author and pioneering futurist, Alvin Toffler. “Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.” Toffler, who died in June at the age of 87, coined the phrase future shock, referring to the psychological state of people, or a social sickness that occurs when there’s "too much change in too short a period [...]
It’s the day of the big sales presentation. You and your team put in countless hours making sure the PowerPoint is flawless, your brand is accurately depicted and your final sales pitch will be pontificated perfectly. Then you show up 10 minutes late (you’ve gotten lost and couldn’t find parking), you say hello to Steve (Scott) with a confident handshake before finding out your laptop can’t connect to the wireless network and you were supposed to bring a projector for your sales [...]
The eight-hour workday is an outdated and ineffective approach to work. Let go of this relic and try a new, more productive approach.
You can calculate your customer concentration risk by dividing the revenue from your top customer by the total gross revenue of your business in a year.
Meetings don't have to be inefficient! Use the following guidelines to increase productivity.
A disease could be afflicting your business right now, and chances are you wouldn’t even know it. It starts off slow, attacking the central nervous system of your business – the sales department – weakening the effectiveness of your sales staff by diminishing its ability to do the one thing it was born to do – sell. We call it sales sickness, and while its symptoms may seem like only minor inconveniences (sales staff bogged down with account management, a lack of [...]
It’s hard to believe that this actually happens, but some companies make it hard for customers to buy its products. Strange, right? Well, it does happen and it has to stop! If your company is doing and of these things, knock it off! Contact forms that go to nowhere. Someone is contacting you about a product, and you need to email them back. Clarification – a real person from your organization has to email them back, the automatic form submit email doesn’t [...]
