Category Archives: Sales Activity Management
Lead Qualification – Resolving the conflict between sales and marketing
Biggest Sales Challenge – Generating high-quality leads
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?
Also posted in B2B Sales Process, Evolving Enterprises 6 Comments
Communication Problems are actually Process Design Problems
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 [...]
Also posted in Evolving Enterprises, Workflow Management Tagged Milestone, teamwork, Workflow technology Leave a comment
CRM does not improve sales performance
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 [...]
Also posted in Evolving Enterprises, Workflow Management Tagged opportunities, sales, sales performance Leave a comment
B2B Marketing – a four-point transformation strategy
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 [...]
Also posted in Evolving Enterprises Leave a comment
Challenges in scaling up sales
Are you facing these challenges in scaling up your sales process?
High cost of sales, low margins
Lack of clear product/offer differentiation
Complexity in mapping customer requirements to product/offer
Long sales cycle with unpredictable outcomes
No consistent sales performance, difficult to forecast
High level of stress in sales team, high turnover
You can make/provide as much as you can sell
In short, if [...]
Also posted in Workflow Management Leave a comment
Expense Claims Workflow
Companies having a team that is distributed across multiple locations, with a centralized accounts department find it cumbersome to process expense claims by employees. This article suggests an expense claim workflow that is best suited for such distributed teams.
Implementing Sales Management – Where to Start?
An old friend recently called us for help. He runs a successful small business that provides networking solutions, as well as another firm that provides contractual staff to large corporates. He wanted to know where and how he should start implementing ERP in his organization. "Can you ask me some questions that will get me started?". That got us thinking... here is our first mail to him.
Also posted in Affordable Technology, Evolving Enterprises, Workflow Management Leave a comment
Sales performance tracking in solution-driven enterprises
Sales cycles of solution-driven enterprises tend to be longer and more complex than sales cycles of product-driven enterprises, because they involve more detailed needs analysis and solution design. In such cases, assigning and tracking sales performance, in terms of targets and incentives also becomes more complex. This article discusses this issue and suggests a strategy for assigning and tracking sales targets and incentives for solution-driven enterprises.
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The sales bottle-neck in solution-driven enterprises
Solution-driven enterprises quickly recognize an opportunity in the form of a problem or pain-point in the market, and are able to design and deliver a solution. Every small company typically starts as a solution-driven enterprise. But as they grow, companies face a bottleneck in their ability to analyze needs and design solutions for a growing number of customers. Most companies then transform into product-driven enterprises, and lose their agility. This article enquires into this phenomenon, and discusses strategies that that solution-driven enterprises can use to grow without losing their agility.
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Performance Incentives – Risks of being counter productive