What are your criteria for hiring a great sales person, and what qualifications are you looking for? There seem to be as many processes and sets of qualifications as there are sales managers. This series explores hiring qualified sales people.
Read MoreEvery VP of Sales and Sales Manager will tell you that the most important thing they can do to achieve forecast is to “hire right.” The question is why so many struggle with this process?
Read MoreNASA has released a video of The Earth at Night, which is stunningly beautiful.What has this got to do with business, marketing, and sales?
I think it has to do with perspective. We all tend to have the limited perspective of the current clients or prospects we serve. We live in our current businesses just like we live in houses, or apartments, or neighborhoods and cities that we know. And while we know there is a whole world out there, in some corner of our minds, the world ends at our front door, our neighborhood, or our current set of clients and prospects. But there are 7 billion of us on the planet.
Read MoreI recently had a meeting with the CEO of a small $3M company. He wanted to increase sales. When I asked him what was keeping him from increasing his sales he mentioned that he was limited by his inventory, or rather matching the right inventory to the right customer. I was able to give him a simple solution, and it didn’t cost him a thing.
Read MoreThe tagline for Agile Marketing is the phrase “Do, Learn, Adapt.” One common mistake is to believe that simply implementing something quickly is Agile Marketing. It depends. Implementing the wrong thing doesn’t help anyone.
Read MoreChallenging your team requires that you do things smarter and not just harder. There are some goals where working smarter is difficult.
One common case of the “false challenge” can occur in sales forecasting. It stems from the belief that sales people are lazy and will sandbag their numbers. So management might add 20% to their numbers regardless of history or latitude.
Doing great things doesn’t come naturally. It requires an internal drive and often it also requires some external demand.
Several years ago I had the privilege of watching a senior executive challenge a small team intent on developing a new business.
Because this is election season, and because I am an advocate of 1:1 marketing, I masochistically thought I would sign up for the campaigns of both parties to see how they are using email marketing to reach their constituents. I now receive over forty emails a day asking for money. How stupid of me.
Read MoreIn case you missed it, Microsoft recently changed their corporate logo. I thought I would wait until the excitement died down before commenting. You can almost always tell a company is in trouble when they change their logo.
Read MoreA long time a go, in a galaxy far, far away, I ran a team that developed a photo-retouching and pagination system that broke the $100K barrier. We were competing with a $1M system. Today you can perform similar tasks for less than $1000. You can also…
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