Changes to the sales process and funnel management are well under way. Consumers now rule what once was a sales-rep driven process. In the 2009 article “The Consumer Decision Journey” McKinsey & Company point out that the familiar sales funnel selling has given way to a much more buyer driven process. You can also find… Read more
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.
Every great sales rep intuitively senses the pivot point momentwhen they’ve built enough trust in a prospect that they know the deal will close. You know who these reps are – – they are the top performers on your team DO YOU QUALIFY LEADS BY TRUST LEVEL OR TIMELINE ? How about your sales team… Read more
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
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
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
