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 […]
So, The Machine (my new book) has an easter egg in it. At the end of Chapter 1, there’s a link you can use to subscribe (free) to a short course called, Beyond The Machine. Since the release of the book, the BTM short course has been getting rave reviews. And, better than rave reviews, […]
I’m getting tired of battling marketing departments over their irrational devotion to Inbound (and Content) Marketing. It seems that marketing folks can’t help but fall violently in love with these concepts, rendering them useless to the rest of the organization. Here’s my beef. I know, from personal experience, that the content marketing thing works, in […]
Orbitform is one of the silent revolutionaries profiled in The Machine. If you turn to page 101, you’ll find the story of Madison—an organization that found it necessary to create their own hybrid SPE model. Officially, Madison’s story is an amalgam of three organizations’ experiences but, unofficially—between just you and me, dear reader—Madison is 95% Orbitform! […]
Here’s a quick update. As you can see below, The Machine is finished, it has a new cover, a handful of Advance Reader copies are loose in the wild and it’s so damn good that it’s even making Andrew Warner—the tough-as-nails interviewer of tech startups—smile! In more news, The Machine will be available in bookstores and online retailers […]
As I write, I’m flying back to LA after attending the Inside Sales Professionals annual conference in Chicago. Today, I presented The Death of Field Sales, an introduction to our inside-out approach to the design of the sales function. Here are my observations on state of the inside-sales community. The good First, inside sales is […]
