Engaging High School Students in the Trades

The future of all our industries relies on one thing – having a workforce to keep them going. When it comes to the trades, that’s easier said than done. For decades, teens have been strongly encouraged to go to college instead of the skilled trades. Now, that the trade workforce is rapidly nearing retirement, there’s a renewed effort to infuse the trades with some new blood. But how do we do this? We are joined by Dave Hataj, President of Edgerton Gear, [...]

Lagging vs Leading Indicators: What’s important for business growth?

Leading indicators and lagging indicators – while both provide important information used to make long-term growth business decisions, each is saddled with benefits and detriments. Lagging indicators are things that have already happened, and leading indicators are things that will happen in the future. Herein lies some issues. Things that have happened in the past can sometimes be good indicators of what will happen in the future, but not always. Think about a roulette table. As you play roulette, the table displays [...]

Is your sales team stuck in a quote-based mentality?

“Why don't you send me a quote and we'll look it over?” This is a common conversation in the business world. A salesperson has a brief chat with a prospect, sends a quote and hopes to win the business. The prospect responds “yes” or “no” and that’s it. Often the answer is "no" because the prospect is concerned with price alone. This is what happens when salespeople send quotes without really knowing the likelihood of getting that business. When we ask [...]

Calculate the Total Lifetime Value of a Potential Customer

We all know that some customers are great customers, while some aren’t. One way to differentiate the two is through lifetime value. Lifetime value is the potential revenue you could earn from a current customer or prospect. We’ve developed a calculator to estimate lifetime value and we walk you through how to use it below. The first thing to look at when calculating lifetime value is the total amount a prospect spends with your business. Then, consider how many suppliers that prospect [...]

Bring Your Vision to Life with Future Picture

[0:00] David: All right we're going to go ahead and get started. And this morning we're going to talk about future pictures. So, we have a few handouts in the handout section that you guys can download at some point during this, they'll make more sense as we go along. But Eric and I are going to give you an overview of how we use future picture statements, future picture narratives in our business, the buzzword in the industry these days is [...]

B2B Prospecting & the Modern Buyer Persona

The modern buyer persona presents an opportunity for companies to grow like never before. Traditional selling techniques coupled with digital prospecting allows any company to sell on a regional, national and international scale. That said, the modern buyer is juggling 10x the communications they were handling just a few years ago. Phone calls, emails, text messages, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn messages, Slack, Twitter...the list is long and ever expanding. All these communications channels create an immense amount of noise in buyers’ lives, and [...]

How to Accelerate Growth in a Time of Disruption

Obviously, in early 2020 the world is being forcefully disrupted. How do you feel? Is it a disaster? An opportunity? Somewhere in between? Right now in the US, we're not in a new normal. We're in today's abnormal. This crisis will pass, and the world will settle into a new routine. The big question is how is will your business be positioned for growth and success when the "new normal" takes hold? On the go? Here's a 4 minute audio read-out [...]

Webinar: Planning for 2024

Where do you see your company in 5 years? It’s a stock question, but it’s an important one. Many of us are busy creating short term plans – weekly task strategies, monthly budget reports, one-year-sales forecasts and so on – that we forget that long term planning is just as important when it comes to setting financial goals and creating growth opportunities. So, from a dollars and cents perspective, where do you see your company in five years? That’s the subject this [...]

Watch: Mine Your Existing Sales Data for Gold

Welcome to Mining Your Sales Data for Gold presented by the Vx Group, a discussion on how you can mine your Sales Data for the gold we all seek – ideal customers. A little background about this. A few months ago, we recorded a pilot episode of our podcast, Problems Worth Solving, and we talked a little about the need to create an Ideal Customer Profile. Listening to the finished podcast, we realized that while listeners would walk away knowing what an [...]

5 Tips for Writing a Sales Management Job Description

It is a job-seekers' employment market and employers are having a difficult time filling key positions – especially in sales and sales management. But we’ve found the low unemployment rate isn’t the only reason for this. The real issue is poorly written job descriptions. Even when unemployment is low, people are still looking for sales position opportunities. Maybe they don’t like their current job, maybe they want to try something new, or maybe they aren’t even looking and your job just magically [...]

Listen: Why an Ideal Customer Profile is Important

Listen to Vx Group President, Eric Zoromski discuss with Eric LaRose, how to develop an Ideal Customer Profile and use it to identify new customers. When you think about it, there are two kinds of customers, those who buy from you and those who grow with you. Today we’re talking about the latter, specifically how you identify these idea customers, attract them and nurture them. I think it’s true that a lot of people do believe that any customer is a good [...]

The True Cost of a Bad Hire

A highly effective sales team is the backbone of any B2B manufacturing company. From strategic and motivational sales leadership to hungry sellers in the field, each team member plays and important role. But creating this sales dream team is easier said than done, and a bad hire can cost your company in more ways than one, including: Thousands of dollars in lost sales revenue and onboarding costs (up to 30% of employee’s first-year earnings) – Forbes Faster burnout for good employees who [...]

5 Ways to Prevent Dealer & Distributor Sales Decay

Are you in the middle of creating a dealer/distributor network or looking for ways to improve your existing network? This network is an important part of your B2B sales process, but it decays if it's not actively managed. Here are five ways you can maintain healthy relationships with all the dealers and distributors you work with. Continual Engagement: Are you nurturing the connection between you and your dealers/distributors? Stay on their radar through frequent engagement. [...]

How B2B Organizations Can Benefit from a CRM

Many business owners are sitting on a potential gold mine -- with "potential" as the operative word. If your B2B organization is like most seasoned enterprises, it has collected a treasure trove of customer and prospect data, with more tidbits flooding in a constant basis. Unfortunately, much of this data may be hidden away in various corners of your electronic storehouses, from random spreadsheet entries on the proverbial S: drive to pieces of data scattered across your employees' Outlook contact folders. This [...]

Download: Vx Group Growth Goal Calculator

We want 2018 to be a great year for you and your company, and to support that the Vx Group has developed a free tool you can use to determine how many new customers you need to acquire over the next year to meet your company growth goals. Here’s how it works: Download the calculator and launch it (you’ll need Microsoft Excel) Under Company Information, add your company name and dates. Try to keep your growth goals to a year (Jan. 1-Dec. [...]

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