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, […]
A common problem our silent revolutionaries face is that they don’t know how to calculate if their new (or reengineered) sales functions are making them money. A worse problem is that they think they know but end up massively under-estimating their performance. Consider this scenario. It’s the end of your calendar year. This year, you started work building a […]
I received the following email from Andy Watt the other day. Four months earlier I had recorded the video case study below, but I’d been too busy to post the video here. The gist of the email is that, since recording the case study, Andy’s monthly invoices had grown by 30%, on top of the […]
I criticized the religion of Inbound Marketing in a previous post. Inbound Marketing: Retards Growth and Turns Marketing Folk into Zombies. I complained that marketing folk were swallowing the dogma and failing to recognize the practical limitations of inbound (or content) marketing. But what I didn’t address are two deeper points: Inbound vs outbound is […]
You know, there are two types of people in the world. Those who tolerate complexity, in pursuit of simplicity. And those who revel in complexity, having long forgotten what it is that they’re actually pursuing. I write this a little exhausted, after spending countless hours debating technology, terminology, definitions and process with a parade of […]
Real-time feedback enables miraculous feats! Imagine standing on an overpass watching the traffic on a freeway below. It’s amazing more accidents don’t occur when you consider the number of cars being piloted, at high speed, in such close proximity to one another. Imagine the same scene again without real-time feedback. Imagine you could pull a […]
