01
2015
Bridging the Gap between Your Sales Message and Your Buyer
Probably one of the most frustrating issues facing sales people today is being able to deliver a compelling sales message that reaches the right audience with the right message. Oftentimes sales people are presented with the “Corporate Sales Message” that was created by someone in the Marketing Department, and chances are the person who created that message never had a real one-to-one conversation with a…
22
2014
Do You Provide a One-Size-Fits-All Approach?
Have you ever noticed that some organizations appear to have a one-size-fits-all approach to their: Customer’s Problems, Sales Campaigns, Marketing Campaigns and Collateral and Product Development? Why is that? Well, I believe that it is due to the lack of understanding of what their customers need. I believe that there is a lack of alignment between those sales, marketing and product development departments and their…
01
2014Are Your Prospects Deaf, Dumb & Blind to Their Own Problems?
I find it very interesting that there are a lot of people out there who appear to be deaf, dumb and blind to the problems that exist within their own organization. It’s either that or they simply don’t want to hear, see, or talk about them, or admit that they actually have them. When you encounter a prospect like this, it makes you wonder if…
18
2014
It’s about the Quality, not the Quantity!
Is it fair to say that we are drowning in data, information and documents? According to SanDisk, the volume of business data in the world doubles every 1.2 years! Content is easier than ever to produce, but the random scattering of content across legacy files and folders has created a veritable digital landfill! There are numerous reports that validate the fact that the average business…
04
2014Sales Effectiveness or Sales Enablement?
I started a discussion on LinkedIn last week titled “Sales Effectiveness needs help from all departments” and in it I got an interesting response from Traci Curran, who is the Strategic B2B Marketing Director at Revergy, Inc. Traci made an interesting comment to the discussion, “@chuck, on tools like CollaboRate…these solve content problems (pre sales and post-sale). Content is top of the funnel stuff…which I…
13
2014
Bad Leads or Bad Lead Follow-up
I don’t know about you, but I hear all the time how Marketing doesn’t produce good quality leads. I’ve even heard that Sales only follows up on about 15% of the leads that Marketing provides. Does that sound about right? OK, so our image to the left shows our old friends Sales and Marketing going at it again over this whole over worked argument about…
30
2014Talk about the Problem First, Not the Solution!
I happened to attend a round table discussion recently, that was put on by the Social Executive Council, hosted by Judy Mod, who is one of the Principals at Social Gastronomy. The discussion centered on today’s buying process, from the buyers’ perspective. The bottom line of the discussion was that the key to success for sales people and companies, trying to sell their products and…
18
2014
Are you Helping or Hampering your Sales People?
If we look at the illustration presented here, you will notice that both rowers are rowing in the opposite direction. Since they both have their backs to each other, they can’t tell what the other rower is doing. All they know is that they both are rowing and thinking that they are helping to row the boat, but they don’t seem to be getting anywhere….
11
2014
Building a Successful Sales Campaign
As many of you may know, I have been around the world of sales for over 45 years and I have had the opportunity to participate in a number of sales campaigns. Some of these campaigns were successful and many were not. So, I got to thinking about how organizations go about creating sales campaigns and I thought I would share some ideas of what…
05
2014
The Blind Men, the Elephant, and Componentization of Content
I recently commented on a Sales Craft LinkedIn discussion in which Sharon Little with Appcelerator had the following discussion: Enablement and the Content Paradigm, and in her discussion she included an article that was written by Corey Sommers, VP of Business Development at WittyParrot. I was so impressed with what Corey wrote about that I contacted him and asked if I might use his article as…