Markempa - Inside Sales

SEPTEMBER 29, 2006

Do you use the telephone as part of your multi-modal lead generation strategy? A recent BtoB Magazine article by Carol Krol, "Copy this: Telemarketing big with Xerox" shows that, although the phone may not be as buzz worthy as other lead generation tools, it remains the backbone to successful lead generation. However, as Krol’s article shows, the telephone shouldn’t stand alone.

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The Brooks Group

SEPTEMBER 19, 2006

This past week Andy and I attended a conference entitled " The Future of Web Apps " in San Francisco. We attended this conference to help us improve our follow-up and reinforcement programs and get some new ideas to bring you more and better information. We accomplished our goal but I also realized that there is selling in everything. The CEO of Techcrunch, Michael Arrington, was speaking about what companies are doing wrong.

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The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 12, 2006

We are living in era of benchmarking and best practices. It is thus no surprise to me that after having given you an example how to derive a rudimentary forecast from the leaking sales funnel, questions like the following have arisen. You might ask yourself how many stages a sales funnel should have? In the picture of the entry prior to giving the example, I used six stages.

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The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 8, 2006

Companies usually describe their sales process, if they even have one, by a sequence of sales stages describing key activities that are to be carried out by the sales person in the respective phase. I am not going to repeat my opinion on the pitfalls such a concept - focusing on the activities from the sales person’s perspective- can have in understanding where opportunities really are in the sales cycle.

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Trends

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 7, 2006

Yesterday’s entry was probably a bit to dry and theoretical for some of you. Maybe you were also among those who found a flaw in the formula or were missing the definitions of the different variables. To take care of the latter two observations, I have republished a revised version of the illustration for yesterday’s entry. For those that understand methods easier from looking at an example, here it is.

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The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 5, 2006

In yesterday’s entry, I mentioned that assigning win probabilities coupled with a sales process is counterintuitive at the individual salesperson’s level of responsibility. You can look at it as a very abstract, somewhat awkward way for the sales person to declare where the deal is. Today, I will show you an alternative way on how to declare where an opportunity is.

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The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 4, 2006

A frequently used method to factoring into the forecast the fact that not all deals a sales organization works on are going to be won, is to assign a win probability to each opportunity in your list. If you then sum up all the expected order values multiplied by the respective win probability of all the opportunities in your list, you arrive at a weighted forecast.

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The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 3, 2006

In the first week of the existence of this Blog, you might believe it or not, there are already actual readers out there giving me encouraging feedback by e-mail. Many thanks to those readers! If giving comments and feedback by e-mail is the preferred way for you too, this is the e-mail address where you can send your comments to: c_a_maurer @ ceoexpress.com.

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The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 2, 2006

You might agree with me, that sales people cannot be left alone when it comes to forecasting. There needs to be management adjustment. However as a sales executive be warned. Not all adjustments you make are reducing or eliminating bias and thus reduce forecasting errors. There is an easy test to determine whether you as an executive add value to the forecasting process.

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Sales Management

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

SEPTEMBER 1, 2006

So far we have only discussed potential root causes for inflated forecasts. Despite their ingrained optimism, sales people under certain circumstances produce deflated forecasts, meaning they turn out to be lower than actual sales. If you were to plot a time series of actual versus forecasted sales, chances are that you discover that under forecasting (producing a deflated forecast) is a seasonal effect.

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