In addition to "my day job", I've had the privilege of teaching marketing as a lecturer at MIT and a professor at Tufts for a number of years. Each semester I get to hone my skills, think about new ideas and imagine what the brave new world of marketing tactics will become. A very exciting time to be in marketing but not for the faint of heart since marketing today needs to be looked as a series of short timed experiments given all of the superb, and not so superb, tactical choices that are available.
Tags: sales tools, business tools, business planning, business coaching
Yes, there's lots of snow at Stratton
Yes, I will be snowboarding Saturday.
Yes, the Mountain will be fully open by Christmas
Yes, I'm always available to do some turns.
Tags: sales tools, business tools, business planning, business coaching
Blue Ocean? Red Ocean?
If you haven't read the book, you owe it to yourself to read Blue Ocean Strategy especially at this time of year. Buy yourself a Christmas present and download it on your iPad. It's an easy, but very thought provoking read, and you easily can polish it off during the week between the holidays. It begs the question of the degree of change that you might want to undertake over the longer term and whether you want to consider swimming in the relatively open deep blue (and healthy) ocean or in the constrained, oxygen-starved (and highly competitive) red?
Tags: sales tools, business tools, business planning, business coaching
Way too often as hard charging salespeople-especially now when we’re pushing for the close-we forget about what really has to happen to close a deal…and get the actual purchase order.
Tags: sales productivity, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling, sales optimication
The month is moving ahead on plan. Things are reasonably in your control, and hopefully you can see how you’re going to glide this ship in for a safe landing by the 31st. We’ll pick back up on a few hints on Monday for the critical week of mid December.
Hopefully you had a great weekend and took some of my advice and spent a bit of time thinking-even in the form of a rough outline-about your Q1 sales plan. This week is really Crunch Week in terms of making any significant selling impact on the prospects in your pipeline. Next week and the following are still very important but mostly for pulling and pushing everything that you can out of the bottom of the funnel. During this week, there’s still time to focus on your selling process.
Tags: sales productivity, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales tools, selling, business tools, sales optimication
The month is moving ahead on plan. Things are reasonably in your control, and hopefully you can see how you’re going to glide this ship in for a safe landing by the 31st. We’ll pick back up on a few hints on Monday for the critical week of mid December.
Tags: sales productivity, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales tools, selling, sales optimication
Ok, so we’re past the magic threshold of 20 and rushing on the downward slope to the close of the end of the year. Clearly not much time left, and yet, we still have those one or two big deals which are stuck somewhere between Champions and Decision Makers…and no one is returning your calls.
Tags: sales productivity, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales tools, selling, sales optimication
Often times bringing one’s manager into a sales situation late in the funnel process produces positives results. A different perspective. A new set of eyes…and ears.
Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling, improved sales management, selling skills, closing sales, Sales quota, sales training, small business management
Back at it today after a four day break. Hopefully you had time to decompress, grab a bit of sleep and just relax. With just 22 days left in the selling season, the pressure is on, so it’s time to shake things up a bit.
Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling