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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A lot of companies have a sales organization, but what they really have is an account management organization – spending most of its time managing existing accounts instead of hunting down new leads. How do you know if your company has a sales team or not? Look back at the last 12-24 months calculate your customer base diversity ratio. Sales made to new customers --------------------------------------------        =    Customer base diversity ratio Sales made to existing customers Your customer base diversity ratio should be [...]