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 […]
A particular conversation with Ted Fowler sticks in my head. We were chatting on the phone and Ted was explaining the changes he had made to his sales function after reading The Machine. He was describing how they’d copied the model described in Chapter 1. At that point, I cut him off. “I’m not sure […]
Over the last four years, Levitt Safety (Canada’s largest specialist safety and fire-protection company) has reduced the size of its field force and scaled-up its inside sales and customer service teams. In this interview Bruce Levitt and Fraser Gibson share insights into their four-year journey (thus far) with SPE and talk about the challenges and the […]
I’ve noticed an interesting trend. I’m seeing organizations starting to celebrate the fact that they’re implementing SPE—inside the organization, and even outside! I’m thinking, maybe the popularity of The Machine is empowering executives to be a little bolder. Or maybe we’re just doing a better job of selling the end-state. Either way, it’s a nice trend. […]
It’s all the rage nowadays. Build a team of Sales Development Reps (or SDRs) to multiply the productivity of your salespeople. Thing is, as anyone who’s watched Boiler Room knows, this is not exactly a new idea. Boiler Room features a New York bucket shop that uses a call center and high-pressure sales techniques to […]
