A Recent Readers Question: How Easy & Quickly can I Implement Some of the Key Changes to Realize Sales Process Improvements in a Reasonable Short Time?
Thanks for your recent question on my website. Several people have asked it. How easy and quickly can I implement some of the key changes to realize sales process improvements in a reasonable short time? The answer looks different if you are in a large account/complex selling environment than if you are in a more […]
How Can The Salesforce Use Lean?
A recent visitor asked “How can the salesforce use Lean?” There are lots of possible answers, and the reader left no context for what they might be concerned about. Here are a couple of general thoughts that might be useful: Lean can help sell more stuff! Lean seeks to maximize value to the customer and […]
Five Powerful Sales and Marketing Productivity Tips (That are Also Free)
There are tons of ways to improve productivity in sales and marketing. Here are five improvements that will make a big difference and yet don’t cost a thing.
Get Sales and Marketing Data Now – Simple Steps that Make the Difference
It is true that people/customers seem to be driven by emotions (and relationships) in their decision-making process. However, this does not mean you can’t rationally improve these important business functions. The lack of data in sales and marketing (and all the challenges this creates) is not caused by the customers, it is caused by how […]
Are Your Salespeople (and Your Senior Executives) Seeing the World as it REALLY IS?
As a salesperson and a sales manager I loved it when I could get a glimpse of how the senior executives of my company thought. Sometimes, I was shocked to learn they were seeing the world as it really wasn’t. Other times I was chagrined to learn I was the one perceiving things incorrectly.
How Salespeople Earn Respect from their Customer’s Senior Management
As business becomes more complex, the demands of salespeople’s jobs tend to increase as well. Unfortunately, few guideposts exist to help businesspeople understand how to both get into a senior executive’s office, AND earn the right to be invited back.
Sustaining Gains…. How Do You Get Salespeople to Sustain Improvements?
A General Manager Asks: How do you get salespeople to sustain improvements? This is a great question, and salespeople are not a unique challenge in this regard: In fact I would say that getting any group of people to sustain their process improvement gains is a critical challenge. Are there some other parts of […]
A Dirty Little Secret: Why You Really Don’t Need a Sales Process
A Dirty Little Secret: Why You Really Don’t Need a Sales Process By Michael Webb Years ago, I learned a dirty secret of the sales training business: few salespeople actually implement most of the sales training they receive. Then, I learned a dirty secret of the Six Sigma business: few people actually implement most of […]
It’s Finally Here…
It’s finally here… Sometime back, you expressed interest in the book “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way.” With 4.5 stars on Amazon, this unique book has done more than any other to help businesses begin to apply evidence and data to the art of selling. Problems with the publisher took the book out of […]
How Can Lean in Sales and Marketing Allocate Scarce Resources Wisely
A General Management reader asked: “How can Lean in sales and marketing allocate scarce resources wisely?” This great question because, at the heart of things, improving the organization’s performance isn’t just about reducing waste. You are looking for evidence of what the customer values as well, and this can be tricky.
