The most difficult part of a sales manager’s job. Without a doubt the most challenging part of being a sales manager is finding the right sales people to make up your sales team. It’s vitally important to find the right people because as a sales manager you live and die with your team. If you […]
Sales Management: Focus On What Is Important
(Inspired by the book Sales Management Made Simple by Mike Weinberg) A sales manager should be doing everything she can to focus on her sales team. Getting them to perform at maximum proficiency at all times. Making sure that they are focused on all the right things. It is recommended that good sales managers spend […]
It Takes Patience To Be A Great Sales Manager
I once worked with a company president who hired a salesperson in a new territory on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and fired him before the Fourth of July weekend. Befuddled, I asked him why. He told me, “Look, the guy had not brought in a single order.” I asked if he had brought […]
It’s Time To Rethink The Whole Rep Thing
For years now I have been working with reps acting as the liaison between them and the circuit board shops I work with. During that time I have seen the interest those reps have in working with board shops diminish as quickly as the market for fax machines. Most reps seem to have lost it […]
The Modern Salesperson
We’re not taking about your fathers’ salesperson, as they say. It’s a new world and the modern salesperson has to keep up or get run over. That’s just that way it is. I was talking to a young salesperson the other day. The first thing that struck me was how confident he was. This guy […]
Calling All PCB Sales People
Where are all the PCB sales people? A few years ago there were all kinds of sales people on the street. Good sales people; seasoned veterans with proven track records who had been victimized by the stream of mergers that left them high and dry when the conquering company went with their sales force and […]
It’s A Great Time To Be A Salesperson
No kidding, this is the best time ever to be a salesperson. If you are in sales, especially electronics sales, selling PCB design, fabrication, and /or assembly services this is your time. Your services are wanted. Every single company in the business today wants to meet you. It doesn’t matter if you are a direct […]
Selling Against Price
I hate this subject. I don’t hate it because I’m scared of it, but rather because it reminds be that most of our customers pride themselves on their ability to find the cheapest products in the world to put into their products, which they also claim are the best in the world. How exactly […]
Never Forget That It’s People That Buy Your Stuff!
I know we sell technology, and technology is based on facts, on data, and on physics. That is all true, more than true actually. So being technical, and many of us being engineers or operations people (not me), we tend to want to deal in facts, the black and white of reality, that’s where we […]
It’s Only Common Sense: Selling Against the Big Guys
There has for some time now been and ever growing gap in annual revenue numbers between the large international board shops and the smaller local board shops. While most of the smaller North American shops are in the under $50 million-a-year revenue range, the big guys are now hovering around the billion-dollar range-a-year range. There […]