I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to the anniversary of an important day for all of us who work in the inside sales space. On this day 137 years ago the US Patent Office granted a patent to cover “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ….” Although …
International Coaching Week came and went without a lot of fanfare last week. Unfortunately I think that coaching does actually get short changed in many companies. I don’t believe that this is usually a conscious decision in that the manager has decided that coaching is not worthwhile. The problem is that coaching takes time, and …
In part two of the blog series on common mistakes, I would like to talk about what I see as a fairly common error when designing sales processes: the desire for perfection from the start. These managers often have a fairly complex sales process in mind. They have flow charts, complex routing rules, and elaborate …
“CRM, in my opinion, is no more of a sales productivity tool than using Excel and Word are.” So states Nancy Nardin in a recent post where she outlines what she calls the “Efficiency Paradox” as related to CRM technology. This is obviously a statement designed to shock many. I am not one of them. …
As many of you may already know November is National Entrepreneur Month in the US, giving us all an opportunity to talk about the importance of entrepreneurship to the economy. Entrepreneurs have changed the way we live and small business continues to contribute a large number of jobs to the economy. Here at VanillaSoft we …
National Entrepreneur Month and Global Entrepreneur Week Read More »
I still have quite a few conversations every week with sales managers or CEOs who are running their sales teams on paper. Just yesterday I was speaking with the manager of an inside sales team responsible for setting appointments for manufacturing reps. She was spending time every week printing lists to hand out to her …
A lot of conversations I have with sales managers start off with questions about dials. “How many sales calls should my people be making every day?” “Isn’t it always better to do more dials than fewer?” followed by “Don’t I need something that dials multiple lines per user to really maximize lead generation and appointment …
Inside Sales: What Dials and Baking Powder Have in Common Read More »
Yep – I am astonished by the lack of what we should know but don’t. Every day, businesses are cranking out tons of sales calls that seem to fall short of gaining any real intellectual knowledge, despite all the effort. I was chatting with an Inside Sales manager a few weeks back, and he shared some …
It is that time of the year again when we all set our goals for next year. We pour over this year’s numbers looking for the trends, the openings for growth, where we fell short and so on. We drive a flag into 2011 and declare success or stick a fork in it and say …
Not so many years ago, we would click on a few icons, wait for a report to generate, review the report and feel pretty good about the control and speed we had over our data, salespeople and results. Well friends, in a world of instant gratification, reports seem like yesterday’s news. Today, we want live …
Real Time Stats – Instant Gratification and Mistakes Avoided Read More »
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