According to a recent report by MarketingSherpa, the biggest challenge for sales people is to generate high-quality leads.
To try and understand why it is such a big challenge, we must first answer the question – what exactly are “high quality” leads?
Netflix’ internal presentation on Freedom and Responsibility for employees is a great reference for how evolving enterprises can set policies for employee engagement.
This could be a good guideline for Reach1to1’s own policies.
When working in teams, small slip-ups and sometimes big goof-ups are often justified by “communication problems”.
Justin Roff-Marsh, proponent of his highly effective Sales Process Engineering methodology that incorporates the techniques from Theory of Constraints into the sales process – has written an excellent article on his Sales Process Engineering blog, where he explains “Why the term ‘communication problem’ insults your team members and retards the performance of your organization“.
Justin claims that humans are remarkably good communicators as compared to other creatures, and have proven their ability to communicate effectively in complex environments that have very small margins for errors, such as operating theatres or airport traffic control. Hence, justifying errors as communication problems prevents us from investigating and resolving the root cause.
Joe Pulizzi, a thought leader, speaker, writer and evangelist for content marketing, is founder and chief content officer for Junta42, a content marketing/custom publishing community search engine and resource, helping businesses of all sizes learn how to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. Joe has authored several useful resources, including a free eBook and several articles on his blog.
His presentation titled Web Content Strategy – How to Plan for, Create and Publish Online Content for Maximum ROI on slideshare contains concise and powerful hints on planning your web content strategy.
Towers Perrin is a global professional services firm that helps organizations improve performance through effective people, risk and financial management. Don Lowman, who is Managing Director of the Human Capital Group in Towers Perrin recently wrote on his blog about how he has spent half his life working at Towers Perrin.
This is no wonder, for one of the most innovative area of work that Towers Perrin specializes in is Employee Engagement.
Their Global Workforce Study (2007-2008) titled “Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior Business Performance” is an insightful study into how businesses can leverage its people to their full potential and derive business results. It is based on a survey of over 90,000 employees in 18 countries.
The following extracts summarize the key points in the study:
Dave Hurlbrink writes how conventional CRM or SFA applications are not designed to serve the needs of a sales person. The value proposition of a “360 degree view of your prospect/customer” is not what the sales person needs to improve his performance.
A sales person is already juggling with multiple opportunities in the pipeline that are fighting for attention and that take long to close. What the sales person needs is a way to simplify the information and make it actionable. And he needs to be able to get this without feeding in a whole lot of data in the system.
Laura Ramos – VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research focuses on effective lead management, lead nurturing, sales and marketing integration, the development of targeted messaging and winning value propositions, installed base marketing, and the use of digital media and the Web to build customer engagement.
Laura writes about her recently published report that recommends a four-point strategy to B2B marketers to avoid becoming obsolete. She advises against merely increasing marketing spend by creating new campaigns or clever advertising will not deliver results. And suggests that blindly getting into online or social marketing will only de-focus the marketing strategy.
Are you facing these challenges in scaling up your sales process?
In short, if scaling up sales is the major bottleneck to scaling up your business, then here are some ideas to help you understand and tackle these challenges better.
A presentation made to a group of enterpreneurs to highlight the steps
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Performance Incentives – Risks of being counter productive
Daniel Pink gave a brilliant talk on TED about the mismatch between “what science knows and what business does”.
A related post on his blog claims that “Money cant buy you performance”.
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