Legion Logistics’ growth had stalled at about $27m in annual revenues. It took just three short months to fix that problem. Today, requests-for-quotations (RFQs) are up from 5 to 40 a week and new accounts are up from 2–3 a month to 2–3 a week. My interview with Lacy Starling covers a lot of ground […]
Management should NOT attempt to impose a fixed sequence of tasks upon salespeople. An attempt to do so will decrease salespeople’s productivity and damage the integrity of information ultimately extracted from CRM.
Guy Pearce knew that he had to grow. He’d been in business for 20 years but for the last 15, Height Dynamics’ sales effort was pretty much limited to folks answering the phone! What’s worse was that Guy was working long hours, floundering, just to maintain the status quo. He admits he was a capable technician without a […]
Have you ever heard a salesperson boast that if they can just get face-to-face with a prospect, their odds of winning the deal jump to 50%? Of course, you have. Pretty much all salespeople make this claim! If we analyze this statement, we discover that it contains an observation that is (most likely) roughly correct. […]
Felipe Ruanova purchased The Machine after seeing an ad in an industrial periodical. He read the book in two days and then got to worrying about how our two organizations could work together. The problem: Ballistix appeared to be in Australia and his business, Censa Industrial is in Tijuana, Mexico. When we first spoke on […]
A number of Marketing folks would have you believe that inbound leads (or sales opportunities) are superior to outbound. (They generally are.) And that inbound (or content) marketing is virtuous and outbound is primitive and disreputable. (This position is pretty much as silly as it sounds!) I’ve pointed to problems with the definition of “inbound” […]
Team Quality Services allows manufacturers of automotive components (think seats or wiper assemblies) to purchase the capacity of assembly-plant-based Quality Liasion Representatives. This means that component manufacturers don’t have to maintain their own teams of mobile reps. Chris Straw started TQS 20 years ago. It’s now a $15m business, based in Auburn Indiana, with operations […]
Dashboards are all the rage right now. Senior executives, in particular, love the site of a huge monitor, busting with enough colorful charts to put NASA Mission Control to shame. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. But I’m concerned that this kind of display is in danger of giving dashboards a bad […]
Sales is not about personal relationships Salespeople (and other folks who should know better) accept it as a given that sales is all about personal relationships. The problem with this position is that: It’s not generally true. It’s a default assumption that informs the design of most sales environments. However, because it sounds reasonable enough, […]
