|
|
| If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. |
|
| Volume 8, Issue 14 |
|
In This Issue:
 A [sales & marketing] manager's guide to sales in a down economy
Avoid drawn out sales cycles and win quality business
Three ways to gather actionable data to improve marketing impact
Back to basics: Face your sales dragons
Multigenerational management
 What makes [you] a great multichannel marketer?
Go figure: Unlikely methods for direct marketing success
 IBM reshapes its sales meetings
The end of instant messaging (as we know it)
 18 must-have iPhone applications
 Sneak peek: Salesforce.com's new CRM
 How much can you ask of your customers?
 Conducting an effective performance review: Examples and tips
|
|
|
 |
A [sales & marketing] manager's guide to sales in a down economy
What is an executive to do with the sales department in difficult economic times like the present?
The answer is the same as it is for all other areas of the business—adjust capacities, increase efficiencies, optimize utilization and eliminate waste. A straightforward, logical and quite obvious answer. Ask how to do that, however, and the solution is less obvious—much less.
Forecasting During a Storm
Sales departments are not a good place for capricious, haphazard cuts. Such action is most often ultimately counterproductive, as it endangers the one unit that does bring in revenue. For guidance, one can review past revenue that individuals and sales teams generated. However, relying only on this measure is fundamentally flawed. Past results are a trailing measure and are not a reliable predictor of future performance...
Read the article. Back to top
Avoid drawn out sales cycles and win quality business
Jeff Thull is a leading-edge strategist and valued advisor for executive teams of major companies worldwide. As President and CEO of Prime Resource Group, he has designed and implemented business transformation and professional development programs for companies like Shell, 3M, Microsoft, Siemens, Citicorp, IBM, Raymond James, and G
eorgia-Pacific, as well as many fast track, start-up companies. He is the author of the best selling books Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High, The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale, and Exceptional Selling: How the Best Connect and Win in High Stakes Sales.
Thull is also a columnist with Inc.com and his articles are published in hundreds of business and trade publications.
On a list of the "Top 10 Things Salespeople Don't Want to Hear From Customers," few rank as high as "we'll need some time to think about it." For the salesperson, this empty phrase signals a host of potential problems: additional meetings, more people getting involved, requests for detail and information that raises the potential for
more questions—all barriers to finally winning the deal. These frustrating and costly delays lengthen the sales cycle, put the opportunity at risk, permit competitors to get a foothold, increase direct sales expense and allow other valuable opportunities to be left unattended and slip away. Why does this continue to happen? From the
perspective of the salesperson, it is hard to understand why customers so often seem to deliberately drag out their decisions. It would seem more logical for a buyer with a problem to be solved to take advantage of the value of a new solution as soon as they are aware of its potential to help their business. The truth, however, is that
customers are rarely to blame for long-drawn out delays. Instead, it is salespeople themselves who are the biggest contributors to the delays they find so frustrating. Paradoxically, it is the eagerness to move the sale along that leads them into the trap...
Read the article. Back to top
Three ways to gather actionable data to improve marketing impact
Every marketing tactic gets more scrutiny when budgets face the severity of a struggling economy.
Put SEO under the microscope, and it consistently delivers. But marketers need to insure they are getting the most out of SEO, especially during a recession. With this in mind, here are six key tactics from Steve Riegel, director of Search and co-founder of Faction Media to maximize SEO:...
Read the article. Back to top
Back to basics: Face your sales dragons
 |
Close more sales by applying these five strategies when you have to face your dragons.
I'm a big fan of a Canadian television show called the Dragon's Den. The premise of the show has budding entrepreneurs pitch their product or business idea to five venture capitalists who then decide if they are willing to offer funding. This is a great example of selling because the business owners are asking for large amounts of
money (up to four hundred thousand dollars). The smart entrepreneurs get it. The majority don't. The people who get the funding generally have a much stronger approach and are more effective in their appeal. As a sales professional, you face a "dragon" when you meet with decision makers in the organizations you prospect and present to.
Your sale may not be worth a hundred thousand dollars, and that doesn’t diminish the importance of your meeting or presentation. But, if you don’t deliver, your competition might be able to steal the business away from you. Here are five strategies to consider when you face your dragon...
Read the article. Back to top
Multigenerational management
Sales&MktgWatch Classic
A multi-generation workforce is great—more viewpoints and ideas to contribute towards innovation. But as great as it is, organizations are concerned about employee tension due to differing experiences, values, expectations, work habits, and communication styles. Luckily there are proven strategies for coping, and even thriving, with a
multigenerational staff. By now most employers know today’s workplace is multi-generational, and includes different values and work styles. The four generations are typically categorized as Traditionalists or Veterans (65 years and older); Baby Boomers (48 years and older); Generation X (28 years and older); and
Millennials or Generation Y (who began to enter the work force in 1990). With employees having grown up in different times, experiencing different world events, and raised with different values and philosophies, clashes of perspectives, expectations, work habits, and communication styles are expected. But that's no reason the focus
should be on the differences between the generations, rather than the commonalities. Successful organizations develop strategies that result in the generations working effectively together, learning from one another, and showing mutual respect. They are...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
What makes [you] a great multichannel marketer?
In my corporate presentations on talent management, I talk a lot about the value of "A" talent.
These are the individuals who personify the gold standard of exceptional performance and distinguish themselves by consistently delivering outstanding results and inspiring and motivating others. Ranked against their peers they represent the top 20% of the multichannel marketing talent pool that's out there. Studies conducted by
McKinsey & Co. suggest that highly talented marketers are as much as 130% more productive than low-performing marketers. For those who market to multiple customer touch-points, the differential value of a superior performer is likely even greater. Sometime ago, the CEO of a major catalog/Internet/retail company asked me to start a
search for a vice president of CRM. He made it clear that anyone less than "best in class" need not apply, so I asked: "Aside from what is written on the job description, what in your view would distinguish a superior multichannel marketer from someone who is average?" "I'll know it when I see it, " he said. Good to know, I thought, but how
will that help me qualify someone who can deliver knockout results for my client? That got me thinking: What exactly do great multichannel marketers do differently? What is it about them that makes them more prized than their B- and C-level counterparts? Do they have special talent that no one else has?...
Read the article. Back to top
Go figure: Unlikely methods for direct marketing success
In DM, the most unlikely method is often the most successful There's a lot about direct marketing that doesn't make sense.
For example, if you ask seasoned general marketers to identify the most important element of a marketing communications campaign, most will say it's the creative idea. But talk to direct marketers and they'll swear creative is least important, coming in third behind target audience and offer, which combined represent as much as 80% of a
campaign's impact. Another example:... [The thing about direct marketing is that it doesn't have to be logical. Or, as the great agency head Bob Hacker used to say, “Direct marketing doesn't need to make sense. It just needs to make money.” And, thanks to its measurability, it does. But I've always enjoyed finding counterintuitive angles
in direct marketing. Those things that really don't make sense but just happen to work in the marketplace. So I've been keeping a list of these wacky principles, which I present here for your enjoyment and edification.
Before we review the list, you might be asking yourself, “How does someone learn these things? Where do I find them?” For me, the answer is twofold. First you gain experience through trial and error. You experiment, you test and you learn. Then you read
books and articles. Fortunately, DMers tend to share information generously, so most of this stuff is available in print for the taking. These principles may be a little crazy, but they're nothing new...]
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
IBM reshapes its sales meetings
Lee Green, head designer at IBM, is applying the same design method for creating PCs to guide the tech company's sales pitches.
It's a breezy fall day and the trees lining the parking lots at IBM's (IBM) corporate campus in Hawthorne, N.Y., are turning bright red. But the leaves aren't the only things changing here. The site is the first client briefing center where meetings, essentially day-long technology demonstrations and sales pitches for potential
customers of Big Blue's consulting services, have been newly structured. And that process has been overseen not by a sales executive or human resources director, but by a veteran IBM designer, Lee Green. 25 years ago, Green, vice-president of brand values and experiences, helped market IBM's first consumer PC. Now, he has applied what
business school professors and engineers like to call "design thinking" to reimagine how sales teams bring in new business...
Read the article. Back to top
The end of instant messaging (as we know it)
|
Talk is about choice and we want people to have instant messaging with them where they need it." |
|
Those pop-up chat boxes are giving way to a new raft of tools that help Web surfers communicate in real time.
It's the end of instant messaging as we know it. Those chat boxes once commonplace on a computer desktop amid documents, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are giving way to a new breed of user-friendly, real-time conversation tools that Internet companies hope will keep users engaged with their content—and the advertising that appears alongside
it. Case in point: Microsoft's (MSFT) Nov. 13 announcement that it will integrate its instant message service, Messenger, used by 300 million people, more closely with its Windows Live e-mail and social networking sites. So instead of having to toggle to a separate window, downloaded to a desktop, users can strike up a real-time conversation
with someone else right from an application they're already using—say, Hotmail. Like other companies hoping to make money from the Internet, Microsoft is responding to consumers' waning interest in standalone IM tools and their desire for...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Sneak peek: Salesforce.com's new CRM
At its Dreamforce conference today, Salesforce.com shared details on the next version of its CRM software, unveiled a new feature that lets businesses share customer data, and announced that 5,000 Salesforce.com users now use Google Apps software on top of Salesforce.
Salesforce.com today detailed the upcoming "Winter '09" release of its core customer relationship management (CRM) software product, which allows sales and marketing employees to track sales leads and transactions with their customers. During the morning keynote on the second day of Dreamforce, the company's main user and developer
conference here in San Francisco, Salesforce.com executives also announced the ability for two companies who use the product to share information if they partner in their respective markets. In addition, Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, gave
conference attendees a brief update about the results of the Google and Salesforce.com partnership that was announced earlier this year...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
How much can you ask of your customers?
Is customer volunteerism combined with "ownership" a double-edged sword?
It's seems okay to involve customers in providing ideas for new products and processes. Encourage them to refer new business. But beware the downside of poorly thought-out strategies to encourage customer volunteerism and "ownership." Those were messages in the very thoughtful responses to this month's column. Dianne Jacobs
commented, "This builds on the real social need for people to connect in sync with a purpose." Charlie Cullinane added, "I believe we can ask a lot of our customers if we give something back, even if that something is a sense of belonging … just look at this forum … to see it in action." [In spite of the advantages of putting customers to
work, a number of cautions were raised as well. Bruce Dancil warned, "Some of the ugliest cases of over-involvement (of) customers have led to bitter intellectual property right disputes … customers simultaneously trying to drive the product in two
(or more) very separate market directions … (or) feature creep that literally prevents on-time, on-budget delivery."...]
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Conducting an effective performance review: Examples and tips
For managers, reviewing employee performance is a daunting yet critical function of their job. Yet you need not look upon it with dread.
Instead, approach the performance appraisal process as a golden opportunity to give your staff feedback, listen to employee comments, review the job description, and discuss and correct performance problems.
Use performance logs to simplify employee reviews
If you’re relying solely on your memory to evaluate employee performance, you’re making appraisals far more difficult than necessary. That’s why it’s best to institute a simple recording system to document employee performance. For each employee you supervise, the file should include a copy of the person’s job description, job application and résumé. Then follow these steps for recording performance:...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
Forward to a Friend:
Do you have a friend that would like to receive Sales&MktgWatchsm?
Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would
benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits
of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who
may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did!
|
|
|
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from Sales&MktgWatchsm
simply change your status,
or send a letter requesting opt-off to:
The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945
DISCLAIMER: Sales&MktgWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS.
All other trademarks or service marks contained in this email are the property of their respective owners.
At the time of publication, all links in this e-mail functioned properly. However, since many links point
to sites other than businesswatchnetwork.com, some links may become invalid as time passes.
DMS Inc. supports the DMA Privacy Promise and
Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice. We are committed to the proper use of
email and to protecting consumers from fraudulent or inappropriate
offers. Privacy Policy
|
|
|
| |
