Selling can create value for people – it doesn’t always require salespeople, much less pushy ones. Michael Webb answers a reader’s question about how the selling adds value throughout the entire sales funnel.
Executives often have difficulty getting buy in for Lean, CRM, and other initiatives in sales and marketing. This article describes simple measures that win the hearts and minds of customer-facing workers.
Do highly successful companies use process management tools in marketing and sales? You bet they do. Whether they know they are doing it is another matter, however. In fact, when companies TRY to apply lean and process tools to sales and marketing, they often get it wrong. Read this and you’ll get it right.
You cannot win sales manager’s (or salespeople’s) hearts and minds unless you can help them sell. This requires getting inside their skin, and helping them define their problems in more productive ways. Their hearts and minds will follow.
A reader asked this question: How to successfully transform to a lean culture in our sales organization? When you start thinking about it, this is a pretty juicy question. An awful lot has already been written “How to successfully transform to a lean culture.” So, first let’s get our arms around that. One of the […]
A reader named Brian asked: Have you found that diagnostic consulting is more effective than solution selling when working with prospective clients? Answer: Yes. This is a perceptive question, I appreciate the fact you are asking it. There is bad news and good news in the answer. First, the bad news. Diagnostic consulting for […]
As the Rate of Change Accelerates… Oscar Wilde described a cynic as “someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” For business leaders this is no laughing matter. Organizations that understand how customers perceive value can create, deliver and communicate it better than internally focused / financially managed firms.
At its conference last year Marketing Sherpa hosted Kelly Harmon, VP of Marketing at Carousel Industries who presented a talk titled “How to Make Marketing Indispensable – Strategies for Turning Your Sales Team Into Your Biggest Fans.” (24 minutes – a written summary provides highlights) I thought this was an outstanding display of insight to […]
Hector, a sales and marketing manager for a company that makes heating equipment asks: How can Lean and Six Sigma help us increment our market share? I called Hector, and he explained his problem this way: “Our product has great market share in the residential market. My job is to grow the business in the […]
I ran across a classic article a couple days ago that should be required reading for executives trying grow their business more confidently and predictably. It was written in 1993 by Myron Tribus, who was head of MIT’s Center for Advanced Engineering Study at the time Deming’s (also classic) “Out of the Crisis” was published […]