Charlie Bilello, the Director of Research at Pension Partners, LLC, captures the essential differences between the two types of web content: Fast Content and Good Content. What choice will you make? Fast Content vs. Good Content Fast content is timely. Good content is timeless. Fast content seeks clicks. Good content seeks conversation. Fast content induces fear […]
Three Tactics You Can Adopt Today to Improve Inside Sales Productivity
In addition to the sales process engineering changes that Levitt Safety made (see the Levitt Safety case study), they also implemented three tactical practices that directly improved the productivity of their inside salespeople. Direct sales supervision Levitt has learned that a manager for an inside sales group must provide lots of hands-on supervision. Instead of sitting in […]
Is Lack of Sales Training the Problem?
Many articles are written each year about the importance of sales training. Most of them assume that problems in sales can be fixed if salespeople are better trained. Yet it is worth asking these two questions: What problem do we address with sales training? Is training sufficient to solve it? Usually advocates of sales training identify […]
Case Study: Levitt Safety Implements Sales Process Engineering
Levitt Safety, the largest Canadian specialist in safety and fire-protection products, has spent the last four years working with Justin Roff-Marsh to adopt a Sales Process Engineering model. It has reduced the number of field salespeople and has shifted their work to inside sales and customer service. While Levitt made these dramatic changes, it saw no initial decrease in sales, […]
Should Sales Be Engineered from the Outside-In or the Inside-Out?
A story: Our company makes specialized pipe fittings. When our company first started, everybody worked at the main site down in the industrial district. Even the salespeople worked there behind a counter. Customers would stop by to pick up parts they needed. They could get answers to questions about problem situations and learn about new kinds of fittings. […]
How to Start Tracking your Critical Sales Metric: Meaningful Sales Interactions
Most advice about sales metrics treats the work of the salesperson as though it is a black box. These advisors recommend that sales managers track how much goes into the black box (open opportunities, deal size), how much comes out of the black box (closed opportunities, win rates) and how long opportunities spend inside the […]
The Most Important Resource in the Campaign Process: A Promotions Committee
Salespeople depend on a consistent flow of sales opportunities in order to be successful. A tactical approach to sales campaigns will not produce the number of opportunities that they need. Only a small group of senior executives from various parts of the firm can examine the external competitive landscape, draw on the company’s internal resources, […]
Should Your Salespeople Be Prospecting?
Organizations that are starved for sales opportunities (which apparently is true for about 70% of companies) are tempted to put pressure on their salespeople to create more opportunities. They rationalize that since the salesperson’s job is to sell, the job also includes the work to find new prospects. Here’s the logic behind their argument. Because […]
What Are the Primary Objections to a Division of Labor in Sales?
In order to address the problem with underperformance in sales, we’ll have to challenge the assumption that autonomous sales agents should bear the primary responsibility of sales performance. This assumption, more than any other cause, is leading to significant underperformance in sales. If we challenge this assumption then we can divide the labor of sales—prospecting, selling, administration, solution […]
Why Is Sales Underperforming?
Most sales organizations report that they are underperforming. It’s not that sales is getting worse, it’s that other functions in the company like production and new product development have gotten so much better. Decade after decade, these functions continue to show dramatic productivity gains. In this article we’ll look at why sales organizations underperform and […]