In today’s low growth world, B2B companies need to be looking for those market segments and niches that are growing faster than the overall economy.
‘Going where the growth is’ offers our companies the promise of increasing sales to growing customers that are usually less price focused than customers in low or no growth markets.
So, how do we find these market niches so that we can focus our sales and marketing resources on these higher potential customers and markets?
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As leaders, we can often get stuck in ruts, talking to the same people every day and thinking the same way as everyone else.
To breakthrough and come up with new and innovative ideas and approaches to problems and issues, we need to seek out and foster fresh and original perspectives.
But, how…
A customer interaction and a meeting are not truly finished until we take a moment to review and sum up what has just happened.
How do we recap?
1. In a customer interaction, we need to go over the pertinent details of the transaction and ensure that the customer understands exactly what he or she purchased and what will happen next.
2. In a business meeting, we need to summarize the 3 – 5 most important ideas and action items from the meeting, write them down, and assign these items to meeting attendees to complete.
As leaders, we need to spend time on a regular and consistent basis with our skip levels.
What is a Skip Level?
As we move up in our organizations, we become ‘managers of managers’ with both direct reports and skip levels. As an example, a Vice President may have 5 direct reports reporting to him or her and 25 employees reporting to the 5 different direct reports. These 25 employees are the skip levels of the Vice President.
Lose Weight…Eat More Fruits and Vegetables…Exercise More.
We all know what we have to do in order to improve our health. That is easy. The difficulty lies in taking this advice and actually following it.
Likewise in business, there is plenty of excellent and practical advice on how to be more effective in getting things done and driving a business to success.
Below, I offer a list of 10 pieces of advice that are rarely (if ever) taken and actually followed.
What numbers lead to business success?
Henry Ford said it well:
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
This secret to success is empathy. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines empathy asthe ability to understand and share another person’s experiences, ideas, actions, and emotions.
Why Empathy?
As leaders we need to have empathy with nearly everyone we meet. Empathy is a crucial business and leadership skill that allows us to see through the eyes of and put ourselves in the shoes of
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Dealing with non-performers is likely the most uncomfortable (yet necessary) task in building a winning team. Truth be told, few of us enjoy disciplining, remedial coaching, and terminating employees, especially those that we may work with on a daily basis. To avoid this discomfort, we, all too often, tolerate poor performance from many of our employees.
Dear Mr. or Ms. Sales Manager,
I am writing to remind you that I need you. You and your salespeople provide products and services that I need to help me succeed in my business. Unfortunately, many of your salespeople do their best to make it difficult for me to trust them, like them and buy from them. To help you improve so that I can improve, I wanted to share with you these three pleas from this one customer. Continue reading
A dirty little secret in business is that most organizations lack accountability at all levels from the leader to front-line management to individual employees:
As pointed out in the The Oz Principle (perhaps the most well-known book about accountability), employees in most organizations play the “Blame Game:”
In a previous blog, Lessons from a Customer, I related my experience in dealing with 106 companies while I moved from Arizona to California. My conclusion was that most companies provide inadequate customer service and make it too difficult to buy from them.
These ideas ran through my head while reading The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty.
In his book, Spin Selling, Neil Rackham defines the four outcomes of any sales call:
A crucial success factor for business leaders is getting the right things done. Visionary leadership, brilliant strategy formation, and outstanding man-management are all for nothing if we cannot execute and get done what we need to get done.
I offer some thoughts and suggestions on getting things done: Continue reading
We have and need salespeople in order to sell, that is, in order to move deals forward.
Rick McPartlin, the CEO of The Revenue Game (and someone with whom I have worked in the past), has researched this question. His provocative answer: Continue reading
Today’s customer is overwhelmed with too much information and not enough time and attention span to digest it all. As such, the best salespeople have evolved and simplified their sales approach to be more responsive to over-burdened and over-saturated customers.
Today, in order to sell more, we need to be hyper-focused on what is of most importance to the customer. As such, the three keys of sales today are: Continue reading
Having a true customer service culture depends on each individual employee.
Contrary to popular opinion, a successful business leader does not need to:
The all too common refrain in sales and sales management is:
When you promote your star salesperson into a sales management position you lose a good salesperson and gain a lousy sales manager.
But why?
Why do we have so many lousy sales managers out there?
The main reason is that our sales managers have never been trained in their roles as sales managers. Continue reading
“I used to believe that if it doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get done. Now I say if it doesn’t get measured it doesn’t get approved… you need to manage by facts, not gut feel.”
General Jon Michael Loh, USAF
Measurement and metrics are more popular than ever. We have long had operational and financial metrics. But, now sales and marketing (especially with social media) and even human resources are jumping on the metrics bandwagon.
But, user beware!! The use and over-use of metrics can be detrimental to our businesses.
Five suggestions to improve our use of metrics: Continue reading
With so much going on in our companies today, our employees have a large number of competing priorities as they do their daily tasks.
David M. Shedd - Move Your Company Forward 