How much time do you think your sales reps spend actively selling? 80% of their time? 60% of their time? Actually, average sales reps spend only about 23% of their time actively selling — 10.3 hrs/week.* Here’s what they’re doing the rest of the time: Writing proposals Strategizing internally Traveling Creating sales reports Attending sales…Read More
Last week Jim talked about the unglamorous but important topic of distribution channels. It’s one of the “4 Ps” (“placement”), but many marketers and smaller companies don’t think about it as often as they should. It’s potentially the most important strategy in your arsenal. When you sell a physical product, it’s easy to keep distribution strategy…Read More
Do you know what your prospects do with your sales literature? Do they 1) read every last word, 2) skim and file it away, or 3) glance at it and file it away? If you answered #1, you have very special prospects! However, most people don’t actually read sales literature. A quick glance, a general…Read More
Fifty years ago, Peter Drucker said that “any business enterprise has two – and only these two – basic functions: innovation and marketing.” Yet even today, industry leaders are still lamenting that the marketing function is broken. Issue #1: Companies have vastly different definitions of “marketing.” To some it’s a creative function that develops slick…Read More
In my previous article, How to get the most from a print ad, I pointed out the importance of not inundating your sales force with unqualified leads. When you run a campaign, focus on driving profitable revenue, not just a long list of names for your database. It’s ROI, not just the response rate that…Read More
Have you ever considered firing your star salesperson?? I thought not. Yet that’s just what the CEO of Anthropologie did. It’s one of the great stories in “Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win” by William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre. We’ve talked about hiring sales reps that live &…Read More
There’s a reason marketers are literally pouring their budgets into new internet marketing programs. They work. Marketers spent $16.9 billion on search, display and rich media in 2006, and that number could be $31.3 billion by 2011 according to ClickZ and IDC Internet. Internet advertising is growing three times as fast as the overall ad…Read More
Distribution channels have become the least glamorous strategy in the B2B marketing portfolio. Who writes about building channels, nurturing partners and how to improve distribution channel performance? I feel grizzled just tackling this subject. Social media, search marketing and new media are the topics with heat even in the B2B crowd (a small group compared to…Read More
It’s always challenging to recruit top talent for your marketing team. If you’re an early stage company, it’s even tougher. You need extremely talented people who share your passion and vision, are willing to work longer hours, carry more responsibility, in a less defined position, and for less cash than your established competitors. Even if…Read More
Carol Hymnowitz’s recent Wall Street Journal article “CEOs Are Spending More Quality Time With Their Customers” highlights a trend that can directly impact your company’s competitive strategy. CEOs of Nike, Intel and Sun are becoming more involved in the selling process, focusing on tailoring products and services to meet the demands of their top customers. And it’s…Read More
How does your company determine the price of your products and services? Do you try to maximize revenue with prices based on value, or do you use a formula where you add a desired profit margin to your cost? Consumer product marketers generally try to set prices based on what the market will bear. …Read More
In my last post I wrote about giving your next presentation a plot. Whether you’re trying to persuade one person or a thousand, you need to grab attention, build value and close with something meaningful and exciting. Just like your favorite filmmaker! Today I’ve got tips about storyboarding. When you create a storyboard instead of…Read More
When Martin Scorsese won his long-awaited Oscar® two weeks ago, he joked that The Departed was his first film that actually had a plot. What do Marty and marketers have in common? Stories. Great plot or not, we’re all in the business of telling stories. We tell stories in campaigns and sales materials. When we meet with colleagues…Read More
I just ran across this post by Paul Allen “the lesser” and had to share it. Paul runs an internet business incubator called Provo Labs and has founded a number of successful companies including Ancestry.com. In this post, Paul talks about the long tail cumulative effect of guerilla marketing tactics. He explains that building website…Read More
Here’s the fourth and final post in our “shorten your sales cycle” series. In the first article we provided a general intro to the problem of growing sales cycles and identified three things you can do to solve the problem. Step one is to improve your lead quality. Step two is to improve your sales…Read More
Here’s the third post of four in this “Shorten Your Sales Cycle” series. In my last post I talked about the first step in shortening your sales cycle: Improve your lead qualification. Today I’ll focus on the second area of improvement: Executing your sales process. (New to the concept of “sales process?” These posts address…Read More
Yesterday I wrote about a common business problem — growing sales cycles. Today I’m continuing with the second post of four in this series, “Shorten your sales cycle.” So your sales cycle is getting longer and you’ve met with your sales and marketing teams. You escaped in one piece but heard a resounding “too many…Read More
Does it seem like it takes forever to close new business deals? You’re running strong campaigns, generating plenty of leads, seeing a flurry of sales activity. But even though your sales reps are consistently following up, prospects just aren’t ready to buy. Your sales cycle used to be 4 weeks, but now it’s 6, 8…Read More
Yesterday I spent 75+ min. on the phone with a rep selling a very cool product for our business. And I absolutely bombarded him with questions about how his product could solve a challenge I face right now. There was a trainee on the call as well. “Shadowing,” I was told, and true enough, he…Read More
A friend of mine introduced me to a great book recently — Covert Persuasion: Psychological Tactics and Tricks to Win the Game by Kevin Hogan and James Speakman. The book is about creating change in the mind of clients and customers without making them aware that the changes are occurring – “covert persuasion.” It offers great insights…Read More