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: 

Win Business with a new business system
Aberdeen put out a paper on sales lead management the other day. This paper caught my eye and drove home a point. The best thing a company can do is manage their sales leads. If a business does not have a formal sales lead management system in place, the fumes they are breathing, is money being burnt.
Why is this? Because your marketing people care more about sales leads than your salespeople do.

Now is the time to get more efficient. Make sure all sales steps are clicking. Look at the sales process and fix it to make it better. What are your sales stages? What steps are done to win business? Just look at deals that close and do a little soul searching. What stalls a deal? Why does one sales person close more than others? A tell tale measurement for sales managers is what I call stage duration. How long is a sales cycle sitting at a sales stage, like quote, or assessment, without showing progress. 

Case Study: :Lead Nurturing in the Manufacturing Industry

At a recent PackExpo tradeshow I spoke to a VP of Sales at a packaging equipment manufacturer. We spoke about how the leads being gathered at the show were to be managed and , what tools the company used for lead management. This company sold through distributors. Leads were fed to the RSMs or regional sales managers and the RSM would email the lead to a distributor sales person. There was very little follow up and if any follow up was done, it was manual using phone, emails. 

Lead Nurturing Best Practices

Lead nurturing tactics have made the big companys successful, yet only 43% of all sales enterprises use a lead nurturing process. A recent Aberdeen report states this number and other surprising statistics. Like these: 

• 28% of all leads are not followed up by sales
• 16% of leads which are converted to a sales opportunity close 

The stats are interesting.

Cold Calling Refresher 

I picked up an old book from my library Sunday. Written by Steve Schiffman, Cold Callling Techniques, is the name. I have been cold calling for a long time. But sometimes one gets stale. Or in some cases to smart to stick to the basics. One point Mr. Schiffman makes is the ratio of calls to deals, saying that to get one deal, 5 presentations are needed and that 25 calls should pull the 5 presos.

In our work with electronics companies, both electronic manufacturers and electronic manufacturers representatives, we see huge opportunity in streamlining the work with distys. Often a rep firm has hard costs spent managing distribution, in both human resource and time spent. Another rock to turn over, levered by our automated followup module, is the unmined potential in the disty customer base. If nurtured by top problem solvers like your staff, the prospect companys which your disty partners are calling on can become your next biggest revenue producers.