12
2013
Sales Content Challenges #3
This is the third article in this series about Sales Content Challenges, and for this article I would like to revisit my good friend Michael Cannon of the Silver Bullet Group (http://www.silverbulletgroup.com) and offer some outtakes from his Blog posting of 9/25/2013 “What is the cost of ineffective customer communications?” In this article Michael states: “Proof that most of your customer communications (marketing content and…
16
2013
Sales Enablement brings about Sales & Marketing Alignment
I just finished a great research brief “Sales Enablement: Fulfilling the Last Frontier of Marketing-Sales Alignment”, from Peter Ostrow and Trip Kucera of the Aberdeen Group. In it they make some excellent points around the value of having a Sales Enablement process to better align Marketing and Sales. The relationship between B2B marketing and sales teams is more than just about leads and lead management….
06
2013
Do You Have a Repeatable, Sustainable Profile for Success?
I was having a discussion with a good friend of mine recently and we were talking about how most organizations don’t have a repeatable, sustainable profile for how they achieve success. What we were referring to was the need for organizations to be able to have a clear understanding of how they are successful in winning business. For many organizations, they can give you an…
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…
30
2013
How to reduce ramp-up time for new sales hires
In a recent survey conducted by CSO Insights, some 70 % of companies claimed that the ramp-up time for new sales staff ranged from seven months to more than one year. This alarming statistic raises several interesting and important issues: Even though many companies claim to hire only experienced salespeople who can hit the street running, current research and data prove otherwise….
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…