Low Hanging Fruit and the Cost of Perfection
Imagine a small airplane flying low over a crowd at a baseball game. The door of the plane opens and a smiling man appears with a large sack. He turns the sack over just as the plane flies over the bleachers and millions of dollars in [...]
Filed in Business Situations, Leadership Development, Management Training, Sales Management 2 Comments so far
Are You Venting or Just Making Excuses?
A colleague recently posted a rant about the quality of the leads she was handling on an automotive industry social network. As a part of her diatribe on her most recent batch of Internet sales leads, she gave some great examples of just how bad the leads really [...]
Filed in Business Situations, Sales Management One Response so far
Quick, Read This Email… Now!
Today I received another in a long line of email messages from a certain vendor touting their newest and greatest product improvement. This email, like all of its predecessors, arrived in my Outlook inbox as a message of High Importance. Because I receive just one in five hundred messages marked [...]
Filed in Business Situations, Digression, Sales Management One Response so far
Too Much Technology…
When working to help an underperforming business unit (in my real job) grow their revenues, I always discover instances where the unit has purchased some widget, gadget or other magic bullet designed to help them sell more.
Although well-meaning, the manager who made this purchase generally believed against all his or her own [...]
Filed in Business Situations, Leadership Observations, Management Training, Sales Management 3 Comments so far
Sales Management Blogwatch
If it feels like it’s been months since our last Blogwatch in the Sales Management series, that’s because it has. We’ve been scouring the Web for any semblance of great blog entries to help us create a decent Blogwatch and we continued to come up empty handed.
Sure, we saw some great entries from [...]
Filed in Sales Management One Response so far
Sales: It’s Nothing Personal
A salesperson who works for one of my company’s primary vendors – someone who happens to be a former coworker and a person I considered to be a friend – just lost a bid with my company. The vendor had held this business for the past several years and we were nearing [...]
Filed in Sales Management 2 Comments so far
Reciprocity – Sales Training 101
From a very early age, we all learn about reciprocation. That is, when someone does something nice for us, we tend to do something nice for them. As humans, most of us don’t want to be indebted to someone else – especially someone we barely know.
In sales, we often forget [...]
Filed in Management Training, Sales Management No Responses yet
The Best of the Sales Management Blogs
A colleague asked me this week about my first commissioned sales job – he, too, started in sales and worked his way up to management. After a few minutes of friendly banter about old school sales managers and the like, we went back to our regular grind.
Reflecting back [...]
Filed in Management Resource Lists, Sales Management No Responses yet
