What is your Sales Strategy? 

Tony Robbins: "The biggest overlooked fact of business life."

Definition of insanity; expect different results to flow from doing the same thing.

Strategy is not a mission statement. Your strategy pulls the business to where you want it to go. Strategy shapes your business and defines what your operating approach is; how the elements of the business work together, how each element advances, and gains the big picture goal which the business is after. 

Is your Sales Pipeline Accurate? 

Sales Improvement Drivers

Does your company have a sales lead management process?

Marketing is number 1. Number two is the sales process. Boost marketing results and boost incoming sales leads and up go sales. Even if the sales process is not effective sales will rise with the lead count. Even a stumbling salesperson will trip on a deal once in a while. If more leads are tripped over, then more deals will close.

Drivers for Upside Sales Leverage

Marketing

Marketing is the top driver of upside improvement. Leverage marketing to boost profit. Leveraging marketing results is the fastest, easiest way to lift profit. Marketing results now provide leads. Several methods may be used by the business now; sales people, inside or out, working a sales territory; direct mail: pay per click; email campaigns; tradeshows; referalls; article submissions; workshops, and all methods thought to work should be used. 

Slow Sales: Do something about it. 

OK the market is slow now. Now is the time to clean slate your sales business. Clean slate means, brush away today's issues for a minute, and think about what you would do differently. 

If you are not using sales force automation click the button below. If your idea of sales force automation is CRM tools like salesforce.com please view the demo. 54 % of all CRM deployments fail for good reasons. CRM is bloated and hard to use.

If you had it all to do over again-start your business from scratch, or start your organisation, a part of a larger enterprise, how would you do it. The question screaming to be answered is what would you do differently?

Take your sales team. Would a sales force automation tool be in place day one? Would this tool be easy to use and would this tool put accurate sales data within your view? Data like lead conversion rates, and quote close rates, and accurate, near-realtime forecasts.

Are face to face meetings dead? At the very minimum traveling to prospect sites is very expensive and time consuming. Web cast tools can replace the face to face meeting. Even complex sales, with several steps and several contacts in a large enterprise, move along using web meetings. Flexible sales strategies server both the seller and the buyer well. The seller can save time and money in the early phases by using the webcast tools. Then use face to face visits to built the relationships and to track the sales cycle closer.

The Harvard Business Review just released a good article, "A Better Way to Cut Costs." The story here is that aggressive and mis-placed cost cutting does far more harm than good. An example is Home Depot. Home Depot cut people, the skilled employees, and customer service took a hit. And customers took a walk. Best is to target cost cuttion carefully.

Does your company sell through sales channels? Do you use sales partners like distributors, manufacturer's reps or affiliates, subreps? If your sales model is based on in-drect relationships please read on.

Low CRM Payback

CRM vendors promise high return yet underdeliver

Causes of CRM Failure

The CRM industry hit 80 billion in sales in 2008. The promise of integrating a host of customer facing processes is alluring. Yet CRM results fall flat from company to company. Why is that? Here are several reasons: