3 ways to add value to every sales meeting

Sales meetings can be a lot of things: intimidating, rewarding, complicated, etc. But there are times when everyone starts thinking: “I am adding nothing to this meeting.” There are several ways you can add value to any sales meeting. First, don’t pretend you know everything. There is no shame in asking for clarification. Many times these discussions lead to new ideas, better processes and so on. Fast Company recently published an article on this subject. You can see more meeting tips here. [...]

Treat sales like a jet engine

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 [...]

Sales Outsourcing for Growth

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 [...]

Download: Sales-to-Revenue Calculator

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 [...]

5 reasons why you can’t cut your way to profitability

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 [...]

Don’t settle for short-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. [...]

10 Reasons Why Salespeople Fail

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.

Vx Group Through the Years: 2011-2016

Five years ago, Eric Zoromski started the Vx Group with one simple goal — to make companies grow. He started with a simple concept borrowed from the aviation world - "Vx," or a pilot's maximum angle of climb. Flying at Vx gets the plane as high it can as fast as it can, and altitude equals safety. The Vx Group adopted the term to illustrate how our efforts would lead to maximum sales growth for our clients. For the first year we worked with a small group [...]

Should you hire a full-time Marketing Manager?

Marketing your business has never been more complicated. Traditional avenues – television, radio, trade shows and print - are still in play, but so are new ones like the web, streaming video, social media and more.   You hear terms like search engine optimization, social media strategy, content management systems, video pre-roll, site analytics, paid search & display advertising, and email marketing platforms, and your head starts to spin. You know you need someone to manage your marketing efforts, and your first [...]

Build your brand advocate army

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 [...]

Avoiding Future Shock

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 [...]

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