The primary reasons that sales managers fail is that they don’t know how to manage their people, and they don’t manage a highly effective selling processes. Just as an engineering manager needs to be a pretty competent engineer, so does a sales manager need to be a pretty competent salesperson. However, in both cases, their [...]

Yes, you read the title correctly. Marketing campaigns that produce an abundance of leads can actually do your organization more harm than good. Why, you wonder? For starters, high-volume lead generation is a lot like creating a haystack in which the sales rep is responsible for finding the proverbial needle. Bona fide candidates do exist, [...]

B2B marketers who are recognizing the limitations of today’s email-marketing and Web-analytics applications for generating qualified sales leads are switching to a lead- or demand-generation solution to ensure a continuous stream of qualified leads. In addition to providing the reporting that legacy email and Web analytics products provide, demand-generation solutions automate the progression of leads [...]

In the current complex and competitive market, managing the sales process is an important factor for most businesses. By automating a company’s sales process and efforts, one can increase its productivity. Sales Force Automation, or SFA, is a technique used in marketing and business that automates the business tasks of sales. Sales tasks that can [...]

Has your company struggled with Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software? If so, you’re not alone. It’s estimated that between 65 and 80 percent of all system implementations end in failure*. Sales people don’t like working with software, and each rep uses the system differently. Customer/prospect data is inconsistent and poorly [...]

Clear business planning is key to making sure you get back what you spend on customer relationship management projects, says Ron Condon. Two years ago, a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit of 370 businesses of all sizes revealed that only 15 per cent of them had derived any real value from their customer relationship [...]

The majority of people in the sales force spend an average of no more than two hours out of their day actually selling. This fact is astonishing for two reasons. One, how do we as sales people manage to meet our goals. And two, why on earth are we in sales to begin with? The [...]

Does your sales force seem to be treading water on certain sales opportunities? Is the same information coming to you each month when you ask penetrating questions about prospects? Does it appear progress moving an account to closure is bogged down? You say ‘there must be a way to break this logjam.’ You feel just [...]

Of constant concern in senior management ranks is the turnover rate of their sales members. If your goal is to stabilize the sales team, improve their performance and retain your top performers, then you will want to read on.

Referrals aren’t generated, they just happen, right? While many businesses believe this, it is a common marketing myth. Most businesses assume that referrals just happen by chance when someone tells another person about their experience with the products or services they’ve received. While word-of-mouth has always been an obscure concept and certainly unpredictable, new Internet [...]