Most retail executives I’ve talked to recently scratch their heads when the topic of improved customer experience comes up. Yes, 60% of them realize it’s critical. Yes 60.9% of their customers think it’s important. But I hear them say over and over again that “it takes more staff to improve face-to-face contact and that’s going… Read more
New strategies and programs for Social Selling. Gary Ambrosino, a well-known SaaS executive, tells how to set up, manage, and harvest a sales process that increases sales. Business-to-business and business to consumer marketers and sales professionals will be interested.
The traditional sales funnel is becoming obsolete, replaced by the new model of consumer-based trust selling and sales prospecting. According to McKinsey & Company “(The) outreach of consumers to marketers has become dramatically more important than marketers’ outreach to consumers.” The conventional approach of inside and direct sales organizations doing outreach and targeted prospecting has been less and less effective. It is being replaced by consumer driven “inbound sales” where prospective customers reach out to marketers and sellers where and when they are ready. The emergence of the social web has made this a practical replacement for old fashioned sales techniques.
In Part 1 we took a look at Inside Sales Cost (ISC) and the Lead Generation Effect – – the idea is that ISC keeps increasing as the number of leads you generate goes up as you hire more and more people to keep up with the growth – not a sustainable growth strategy. Let’s… Read more
The biggest change in marketing over the past few years has been the shift of focus to Inbound Marketing. Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan do an awesome job in their book Inbound Marketing teaching us all how to use the web SEO as a great untapped resource. The very positive result ? Thousands of companies large and small… Read more
When Eric Janzen sent me a note announcing his new book, “The Postcatastrophe Economy”, I was intrigued. I know Eric not only as a VC and startup company CEO, but also as one of the leading economic and market forecasters through his site iTulip. Eric had accurately predicted the market crash of 2008 and as… Read more
Usually it’s some “Big Strategy” that gets customers to talk about how much they like about quality and level of support offered by a tech vendor. That is until the Big Strategy (i.e. that latest Sales Promotion) is over and things are back to service as usual – – which most of the time… Read more
I was tempted to title this post “how engineers and math majors will rule sales”. Back in the old days, when men were men and ships were made of wood, sales was managed by one number – – quota performance. If you were a sales rep you either made it or didn’t. … Read more
The problem appeared simple. I joined Timetrade in February as EVP and COO and wanted to really upgrade our approach to the market. We were getting ready to introduce our Workgroup Scheduler online appointment setter, a great iPhone application, and a brand new Appointment Cloud SaaS initiative. All new ideas for our team, especially… Read more
