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, […]
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 […]
As you know, we build a lot of sales processes, here at Ballistix. You may not know that we build almost as many customer-service teams, inside-sales teams, pre-production teams and even small project teams (in knowledge-based environments). The work we do in these non-traditional (for us) environments is very gratifying and, often times, generates enormous […]
Here’s a favorite post of mine from our old Yahoo group … Philosophies collide! I was presenting a workshop in Darwin (Australia) recently when the manager of a (government-funded) organization objected that our methods focus only on the financial bottom line — and that they are not conducive with the concept of triple-bottom-line management. Now, […]
In a previous post, I poked fun at the practice of sales forecasting in major-account sales environments — referring to it as hocus-pocus with a dollar sign. The essence of my argument was that, in environments where transactions are small in frequency, but large in magnitude ($’s), the traditional approach to forecasting destroys information — […]
Imagine you were to awaken one morning suffering from a strange disorder: one that rendered your eyesight unreliable. When you open your eyes, your bedroom appears roughly as it did the night before. Your bed is below the open window, and your dresser is still adjacent to the door. However, a second look reveals that […]
and how to fast-track the growth of your business in the process. Over lunch, a CEO recently admitted to me that his financial controller was using his organisation’s profits to build quite a substantial commercial property portfolio. When I asked if this was best use of his organisation’s free cashflow, he smiled, “How did I […]
Tell me, how’s your conversion rate? Specifically, is your organisation converting the optimal percentage of sales opportunities into sales? My bet is that you’ll find this question hard to answer … for two possible reasons: You don’t know what your optimal conversion rate is. You can’t bring yourself to be happy with a conversion rate […]
Applying the Theory of Constraints to the design, resourcing and management of the sales process [Presented at: TOCICO Conference, Miami 2004] Introduction The traditional sales process is hard to manage and all but impossible to scale. This paper introduces a radical new approach to sales process design, resourcing and management. The result of this approach […]
