Gone (and buried, hopefully) are the days of running back to your desk after a trade show with a hand full of business cards and sitting down to make semi-cold calls and then entering basic data into either ACT or Goldmine. Both good basic sales automation tools- back in the day-when the alternative was an over-stuffed Rolodex spilling out hundreds of cards in all shapes and colors with coded notes scribbled everywhere that sometimes only the CIA could interpret.
Movin’ The Needle: Lead Gen Connections in a Sales 2.0 World
Posted by
Jack Derby, Head Coach on Thu, Aug 12, 2010
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales effectiveness, improved sales management, Sales quota, sales training
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the breakfast counter at the Rye General Store, where I bike most mornings when I’m at the beach, and I looked up from my Globe to see Dottie sitting at the opposite end of the counter. Dottie and I grew up together at the beach pretty much from our earliest childhood years through high school since our parents had cottages right next to one another. After we both bumbled through the normal awkwardness of not having seen one another for 35 plus years, we quickly connected on spouses, jobs, kids and kids’ kids, and then got down to the interesting stuff of what had happened to the pods of kids that we grew up and surfed with.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales effectiveness, improved sales management, Sales quota, sales training
For years now, I’ve talked, lectured, cajoled and beaten my salesguys into submission with The Derby Law of 3,000. In a nutshell, The Derby Law says that if you work 60 hours a week (I wish that I could find that job!), which is 3,012 hours, you immediately lose 25% due to holiday, vacations, and sick time. Without going into numbing detail, you lose another 40% of the remaining time due to non-sales activities since our data from now thousands of salespeople says that only 57% of thier available time is spent both preparing for and actually making the sales call. All of this boils down to around 1,300 hours to actually sell…and now my question, as a manager, should be just how effective can I make my time and the time of my salespeople? It would be great if I could hem 90% effective, which would be perfect, but sadly impossible. If, on the other hand, they’re only 50% effective with the time they have available, then I have a really big problem. 50% would be an impossible situation to resolve. Might as well resign right away.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales effectiveness, improved sales management, Sales quota, sales training
I happenned to be with Mike McEachern, the CFO of Brainshark, one of our favorite customers, the other day, and we got around to talking about plans for the weekend. Among the countless normal “HoneyDo” tasks that all of us are faced with every weekend, Mike was making sure that he squeezed in sufficient time to put 50 miles on his road bike. Mike has been a serious biker for a number of years now ever since he started participating in the Pan Mass Challenge, one of the biggest charity rides in the country. In the winter, when the snow and nasty cold don’t favor his training requirements, he hits the ice every week with a local hockey team. When I asked Mike why all the physical conditioning, the answer was simply, “Just to stay in shape.”
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Tags: sales management, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management, sales management training, sales training
Doc Rivers was quoted on ESPN where he was asked about his career in coaching the Celtics, and he described it as “a miserable joy”, and anyone who has been a student of either pro basketball or became caught up in the most recent excitement of March Madness, knows exactly what this means. The cliffhanger of Duke’s final win in the NCAA championships this year, and the stunning upset of Kansas’ unexpected loss a couple of weeks ago bring all coaches to the point of either tearing their hair out- the misery- or basking in the glory of the final win and its accompanying praise -the joy.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management
Tuesday, 4:30 AM
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management
The good news is that, as a firm, we’ve had a very busy Q1. With budgets in place, almost every customer we’ve worked with in the first quarter held either business or sales planning sessions to think through and create detailed tactical plans. In some cases, these plans focused on Q1, while the majority of them typically detailed just the first half of the year. Only in a few companies, did we bother to define the second half of the year except to note the general financial plan assumptions that led up to the 2010 budget.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management
The issue of “power” was front and center with me all this weekend. With two violent winter storms converging, the coast of NH was slammed with hurricane level, sheering winds and three days of flooding rain. All of which resulted in the loss of power at the house from Thursday through Saturday.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management
As everyone knows who reads these posts, in my “spare time”, I teach business planning and marketing as a lecturer at MIT and as a marketing professor at Tufts. I love the work and student involvement, plus it provides an excellent opportunity to integrate concepts into the real world of sales and marketing tactics, both for my students and for our companies at the firm since often they become case studies in the classes.
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Tags: Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness
This column this month is a continuation of the thought process from January’s “Hawks & Doves” discussion that drew a large number of comments. Hopefully, this will do the same since it is meant to be of a “Sales Tips” piece.
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Tags: sales, sales management, sales management effectiveness, selling, selling skills, strategic planning
