by Chuck Besondy
The revenue funnel isn’t the sole domain of sales or marketing. CFO’s should be as familiar with their company’s funnel structure and metrics as any sales executive or marketing executive. Here’s why.
1. Funnel modeling tools provide the best way for marketing, finance, and sales to talk the same language during planning and [...]

by David R Ednie
Success in sales comes from creating clarity in the mind of your customer. Clarity in understanding the problem to be solved, clarity in evaluating the possible solutions available and clarity in determining the real value to the business that each solution provides today and in the future.
Clarity helps the customer to move [...]

by Robert Pease
One of the companies that I am working with is confronting this reality head on. Every start-up I have been a part of has learned the lesson (the hard way) that staffing up with a large national (and many times mediocre) sales team for an emerging technology company is a recipe for [...]

The secretary, every salesperson’s nightmare! They are the ones charged with keeping the evil salespeople from getting in-touch with decision makers. For fear that WE in our snidely ways will somehow single-handedly talk that person into buying something that will ultimately bankrupt the company or something worse.
So today when I volunteered to help a college [...]

by Jonathan Gilliam, Interim Sales Executive
Often the CEO or VP Sales is “frustrated” with their sales teams (expletives deleted) and ask me to please come fire them all. They complain that their people “just don’t have it in them” to constantly cold call and keep a high rate of activity which of course will make [...]

When working with company‘s that have sales revenue and profit challenges one of the first places to look and diagnose the root cause is within their sales numbers, specifically the sales pipeline. The sales pipeline typically reveals the symptoms associated with the revenue and profit challenges a company is currently experiencing or will experience. One [...]

Many sales executives and managers often ask the wrong questions. They may ask “How many sales did you make today?” or judge a successful day simply on the number of successful sales. There is a commonly held belief that sales can be managed, but it can not. Here’s why-
Jeff Fisher, the coach of the Tennessee [...]

Sales executives are currently facing a sales climate that is tougher than ever. Competition comes from areas until recently unseen – offshore/international suppliers, internet “virtual suppliers”, ”knock –off” manufacturers, etc. Yesterday, when I called technical support for a well known US computer manufacturer, the call was routed seamlessly to New Delhi (toll free, no hold [...]

Effective sales executives know that successful sales strategy, in combination with well-designed product and marketing strategies, make up an effective revenue generation strategy. All three of these components affect and enhance each other and must be aligned if an organization wishes to achieve sustainable revenue growth.
One critical factor in any sales strategy must be [...]

by Michael Pearce
Forward looking executives must routinely search for and consider the need for new management models. As Gary Hamel so accurately predicts in his book, The Future of Management your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.” He argues that our traditional, decades long way of [...]