The making of the best sales team in the world So many people spend time tearing down their sales people. Blaming all of their woes, and worries, on the very people who can make or break a company. I once worked for a PCB shop owner who insisted on having a very expensive annual sales […]
Taking Stock Of Your Rep Network
Do you feel you are getting everything out of your rep team that you should be? Do you a full network of sales reps, reps all over the country yet you are just not getting much out of them? How about these problems? Try these on for size: You keep hiring new reps but you […]
A Day In The Life Of A Salesperson
This will be a sales person who has a territory away from the company, so she is operating out of fully equipped home office where she has everything she needs to conduct her business. Her required reporting is a weekly status report of her activities during the week as well as her plan for the […]
Upselling: The Magic Road To Profitability
Everyone upsells, it’s the best way to increase your margins. The famous, “want fries with that?” is an upsell. Super sizing is upselling. That maintenance plan on your washer and dryer is upselling. That rust coating on your car, whatever that was…was upselling. Notice how when you buy a new laptop for $600 it’s still […]
What A Really Good Sales Manager Does
Okay, you’re the sales manager for a 15 million dollar board shop located in the Midwest. Your sales team consists of 6 direct regional sales people and five independent sales reps; together they cover the entire U.S. and Canada. Besides managing the sales team, you also handle the company’s marketing and yes, you are also […]
What’s Wrong With Just Sticking To The Plan?
It’s amazing how much can get done when you decide to stick with it Another year another strategic plan…or worse yet another month another strategic plan. Does this sound familiar to you? Well it does to me. The most difficult thing to do when you’re a strategic consultant like I am is to make sure […]
50 Reasons We Don’t Need Marketing And Sales
Here are some of the dumber things I have heard from people about marketing and sales: I think I’ll place one ad in a trade magazine do you think that will be worth the money? I sent out a hundred sales letters and only received ten responses and five orders. We decided to make this […]
How Well Do Your Customers Really Know You?
As always, it’s all about the customers and more importantly, it really gets down to what your customers think about you. I want you to really think about this for a minute or two. What do your customers think about your company? What do they think about how you do business? Would they recommend you […]
You Gotta Keep Trying
Even after 11 tries! I read a book the other day that said that you have to make at least eleven contacts with a company before they become a customer. Eleven contacts? Wow no wonder so many people don’t make it in sales? Eleven is about eight more than most people I know, try before […]
You Have To Love Your Product
You’d better love what you sell. That’s what successful salespeople do. First, a true story about company loyalty…on steroids! My father was a very hard-working Coca Cola salesman. No matter the weather, rain, or shine, snow, sleet, hail, whatever, he was out there every day driving on the back roads of Maine, delivering his heavy […]