The Titanic is Sinking All is not well in sales. The sales environment, in a typical organization (most every organization, in fact), is seriously dysfunctional. But rather than focusing on the obvious dysfunction, management is busy with incremental improvement initiatives: Sales training Sales force automation (technology of various types) Bolt-on lead-generation activities (outsourced telemarketing, for […]
Okay, perhaps evil is a bit of an exaggeration, but whenever I encounter an environment where time is tracked and billed, I see tremendous inefficiencies and value-destruction. Let’s consider why. Imagine you have something to sell – a widget, say. Tell me, for how much should you sell it? The answer to that question is […]
AdVerb is dead: long live ‘SPE Update’ After more than 12 years, we’ve retired AdVerb – the long-running Ballistix periodical. We’ve replaced AdVerb with SPE Update – an email update of new posts, as I publish them, on my blog. As you probably know, my blog has been in existence for some time now. But […]
Alejandro Céspedes wrote to me the other day with the following question: Hi Justin Just wanted to ask if you’ve designed a way of managing the sales budget of a company. In other words, how to review if the salespeople are meeting the budget or not. Most companies are affected by the end-of-the-month syndrome, and […]
The Holy Grail of technical sales: how to disentangle salespeople from production Whenever we work in a technical-sales environment, this – bar none – is the most valuable idea we bring to the table. Here’s the most obvious symptom of the problem: When salespeople make a technical sale, they inevitably become entangled with production. Their […]
Today, on Harvard Business Review Online, Peter Bregman argues: why not having a plan can be the best plan of all. Of course, this is just the latest salvo in a long-running battle between the traditionalists – for whom no plan is ever detailed enough – and the now generation – who see planning as […]
Late last night I was in conference with a potential client in South Africa (I’m in Australia, right now). Towards the end of our conversation, he asked if I thought much market intelligence could be gleaned from customer surveys. I answered (almost instinctively), data, yes; but, intelligence, no. When pressured for a more coherent answer, […]
If you didn’t get a chance to participate in last week’s conference call, you can listen to a recording of this call below. It’s an introduction to Sales Process Engineering (45-minute introduction to SPE, and 15 minutes of question time). This event was hosted by Constraints Management Group. It’s a preview of my two sessions at […]
Recently I posted a quick-and-dirty guide to process improvement. One particularly difficult question that I skipped over in that post was this one: When you are mapping your workflow, how do you determine the ideal level of granularity? In other words, how much detail is too much? Conventional wisdom is that: Planning and execution are […]
