Just got back from a Saturday afternoon reading on the beach and was, once again, struck by the rapid change in just one week in almost everything. Just before I succumbed to the soft sounds of the surf and the 75 degree temps which somehow forced me to stretch out on the sand and take a short nap, I noticed that the evidence of change was everywhere.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, improved sales management, sales management training, selling skills, Sales quota, sales training
Movin’ The Needle: Lead Gen Connections in a Sales 2.0 World
Posted by
Jack Derby, Head Coach on Thu, Aug 12, 2010
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.
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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
In her 1967 hit, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Aretha Franklin takes these Otis Redding lyrics to a new dimension as she blasts out “Re, Re, Re, Respect” in the middle of the song on her way to making this tune a landmark in the feminist movement, and what is often considered to be one of the best songs of the R&B era. I love music-any kind, any genre-from Timberlake to Usher to Eminem, to 40’s Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey, but Aretha’s song has a special place in my tune-filled head, so it’s not unusual when I’m truly relaxed to find that some deeply hidden player in my sub consciousness suddenly just switches on and plays “RESPECT”.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales effectiveness, selling, selling skills
Movin’ the Needle – How Fast to Step on the Gas?
Posted by
Jack Derby, Head Coach on Thu, Jun 17, 2010
Last week I was able to combine visiting one of my most engaging customers, Lake Sunapee Bank in the picture-perfect town of Newport, NH, with talking to my favorite economists, Brenda.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales effectiveness, selling, selling skills
Just got back from my almost-daily early morning walk up and down the beach. Today looks like another overcast but pleasant day, but duty calls, and I’m off to the Boston office. Last Sunday, there was fog so thick that it was hard to see the ocean since it was just at that tipping point between fog, heavy mist and light rain-all of which made my daily search for sea glass impossible.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales effectiveness, selling, selling skills
Balance
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Tags: Sales Optimization, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management
We’re heavily experienced sales managers and heads of companies who have sat in the sales management seat numerous times and have been directly responsible for quotas, forecasts and detailed sales plans. We believe in process, metrics, integrated sales tools and detailed sales training through which we can provide 30%-50% increases in the productivity of a sales team.
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Tags: Sales Optimization, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management
I remember very vividly when I first began the consulting business…and was not doing that well. I’d been pitching a relatively large prospect on the benefits of my background, processes and systems of what we today would call “lean manufacturing”. Working my way through the maze of Purchasing, Quality and Manufacturing Managers, I finally engineered a meeting with the CEO for the final pitch. Although I never did receive an order for manufacturing process improvement, he and I hit it off during that meeting such that we went on to develop a multi year relationship building the business and finally selling it very successfully to 3Com. I had became his coach, and he had became a very valuable partner.
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Tags: Sales Optimization, sales management effectiveness, improved sales management
