Drivers for Upside Sales Leverage

Marketing

Marketing is the top driver of upside improvement. Leverage marketing to boost profit. Leveraging marketing results is the fastest, easiest way to lift profit. Marketing results now provide leads. Several methods may be used by the business now; sales people, inside or out, working a sales territory; direct mail: pay per click; email campaigns; tradeshows; referalls; article submissions; workshops, and all methods thought to work should be used. 

Slow Sales: Do something about it. 

OK the market is slow now. Now is the time to clean slate your sales business. Clean slate means, brush away today's issues for a minute, and think about what you would do differently. 

If you are not using sales force automation click the button below. If your idea of sales force automation is CRM tools like salesforce.com please view the demo. 54 % of all CRM deployments fail for good reasons. CRM is bloated and hard to use.

If you had it all to do over again-start your business from scratch, or start your organisation, a part of a larger enterprise, how would you do it. The question screaming to be answered is what would you do differently?

Take your sales team. Would a sales force automation tool be in place day one? Would this tool be easy to use and would this tool put accurate sales data within your view? Data like lead conversion rates, and quote close rates, and accurate, near-realtime forecasts.

Are face to face meetings dead? At the very minimum traveling to prospect sites is very expensive and time consuming. Web cast tools can replace the face to face meeting. Even complex sales, with several steps and several contacts in a large enterprise, move along using web meetings. Flexible sales strategies server both the seller and the buyer well. The seller can save time and money in the early phases by using the webcast tools. Then use face to face visits to built the relationships and to track the sales cycle closer.

The Harvard Business Review just released a good article, "A Better Way to Cut Costs." The story here is that aggressive and mis-placed cost cutting does far more harm than good. An example is Home Depot. Home Depot cut people, the skilled employees, and customer service took a hit. And customers took a walk. Best is to target cost cuttion carefully.

Does your company sell through sales channels? Do you use sales partners like distributors, manufacturer's reps or affiliates, subreps? If your sales model is based on in-drect relationships please read on.

Low CRM Payback

CRM vendors promise high return yet underdeliver

Causes of CRM Failure

The CRM industry hit 80 billion in sales in 2008. The promise of integrating a host of customer facing processes is alluring. Yet CRM results fall flat from company to company. Why is that? Here are several reasons: 

Win Business with a new business system
Aberdeen put out a paper on sales lead management the other day. This paper caught my eye and drove home a point. The best thing a company can do is manage their sales leads. If a business does not have a formal sales lead management system in place, the fumes they are breathing, is money being burnt.
Why is this? Because your marketing people care more about sales leads than your salespeople do.

Now is the time to get more efficient. Make sure all sales steps are clicking. Look at the sales process and fix it to make it better. What are your sales stages? What steps are done to win business? Just look at deals that close and do a little soul searching. What stalls a deal? Why does one sales person close more than others? A tell tale measurement for sales managers is what I call stage duration. How long is a sales cycle sitting at a sales stage, like quote, or assessment, without showing progress. 

Case Study: :Lead Nurturing in the Manufacturing Industry

At a recent PackExpo tradeshow I spoke to a VP of Sales at a packaging equipment manufacturer. We spoke about how the leads being gathered at the show were to be managed and , what tools the company used for lead management. This company sold through distributors. Leads were fed to the RSMs or regional sales managers and the RSM would email the lead to a distributor sales person. There was very little follow up and if any follow up was done, it was manual using phone, emails.