In a previous post I wrote about the five actions sales managers could take to improve the management of their sales teams. But how do you know you have a problem, or a need to improve. How can you foresee when things might go wrong? What are the indicators that help identify impending risks? If…
I want to revisit a topic that I wrote about a few years ago about a very dangerous sales forecasting practice, that at its worst can be a terminal illness for a sales person or a sales manager. This disease is still as commonplace as it was when I first wrote about it, but with…
Sometimes you just have to walk away from a buyer. If you have read much of what I have written, you will know that I believe that it is a supplier’s responsibility to adopt the customer’s perspective, understand what the customer wants and then apply their experience and expertise to bring value to the customer. That’s…
There has been tremendous progress in Algorithms, Data Science, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence. When there is enough data and the workflows are simple, these technologies deliver tangible benefit. However many of the tasks performed by those knowledge workers in Sales, Marketing or Customer Success are Small Data problems, not Big Data problems, and the…
Last week one of my customers asked for my thoughts on the statistic from CEB about the increase in the number of customer stakeholders growing from 5.4 to 6.8 stakeholders. He forwarded to me an email with the infographic above and a link to an article entitled The New Normal in Sales: Customer Dysfunction.…
Kelly is a busy sales manager who manages a team of B2B enterprise sales people. Working for ContourIQ, she has an expansive sales territory covering most of the Midwest of the United States. With nine sellers on her team, there are two top performers who she knows she can count on every quarter. At the…
