07
2013
Success is 90% Preparation, 10% Perspiration
We’ve all heard the adage “Success is 90% preparation and only 10% perspiration”. The great scientist Louis Pasteur once said, “Chance favors the prepared mind”. This is an area that I believe needs to be addressed more effectively by sales people and the organizations they work for today. So, let me start by asking: Are your sales people as prepared and effective as they need…
01
2013Do you really know what’s working and what isn’t in your sales, marketing and product areas?
I had a very interesting and enlightening conversation today with a consultant who works for the company that developed my website. She asked me to tell her who my target audience was and who I was trying to reach. I explained to her that my target audiences were medium to large-sized organizations that were struggling with poor sales and marketing alignment, effectiveness and productivity. She…
24
2013
Is your company message on target?
This week’s blog post was influenced by a couple of different resources and both came from two different LinkedIn discussions. The first came from a link that Michael Cannon provided from some research that his Silver Bullet Group did called “Customer Communication Effectiveness Index” (www.silverbulletgroup.com/research). The second came from a link in a discussion that I currently have running in the Sales / Marketing Executives…
18
2013
How Important is Sales Enablement to Your Organization?
What exactly is Sales Enablement anyway? Well, there are two really good definitions that I like to quote. The first definition is provided by the Forrester Group: “Sales Enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life…
02
2013
Great Things Happen When People Collaborate
I’m not sure whether you have noticed the number of discussions, articles, webinars and postings around the whole concept of collaborating. Obviously, there is a lot of value in being able to do just that and it comes out in a number of different ways. One of the ways that we see collaboration working a lot is through the creation of something. That something could…
20
2013
Top 10 Reasons Why Your Marketing Team is Failing You and How To Fix Them
My good friend Michael Cannon, who is the CEO of the Silver Bullet Group (www.silverbulletgroup.com), is clearly one of the top people in the industry that I believe consistently has the inside track on what Marketing organizations can do to be more effective. With his permission, I am presenting his article and hope that you, too, will become a follower of Michael and the Silver Bullet…
17
2013
Time is Money
The old adage that “time is money” has never been more of an issue than it is today. Have you ever noticed how everyone wants things faster? I just heard that Samsung is going to introduce a new phone that is going to have 5G speeds. This is supposed to be 100 times faster than the 4G phones that are out there today. They said…
08
2013
Don’t Talk About Products, Instead Talk About Solutions!
In thinking about creating my latest blog, one of the things that came to mind was a credo that I actually have posted on my wall above my desk. The credo that I created goes like this: Think the way your Customer Thinks Look at yourself through your Customers’ Eyes Listen to yourself through your Customers’ Ears Speak in terms of what Matters to Them…
01
2013
The number one reason why most sales calls fail (and what you can do to avoid it!)
Believe it or not, a surprising number of sales professionals still rely purely on luck and good social skills when attempting to sell at an executive level. Unfortunately, good fortune and a winning personality, while certainly helpful, are not proven strategies for delivering consistently successful results. In fact, when some 10,000 C-suite executives were asked in a recent survey to reveal their major hesitation in…
25
2013
Whether You Think You Can, or You Think You Can’t, You’re RIGHT!
Isn’t it funny how some people are their own worst enemy? I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he was telling me about this person he had spoken to who was out of work and looking for a sales position. The man had a good number of years of sales experience but was fast approaching 70, and a lot of…