This article was first published on Thomasnet.com. You can read the original here. Your salespeople are NOT short of leads! If you hear a crazy idea often enough, there’s a danger that you’ll come to passively accept it — particularly if it’s on the periphery of your primary interest area. Some of these ideas (think, astrology) are harmless enough. But there’s a danger that, every now and then, one of these crazy ideas will implant itself in your mind, masquerading as knowledge, and cause you to make less than optimal management decisions. The commonly accepted idea that “sales leads are ..read more

When we work with those manufacturers that sell via resellers of various types, we often encounter an instance of the Drunkard’s Search problem within the sales department. This article describes the problem, as well as a solution we devised around 15 years ago—but abandoned because we believed it was too complex to be practical. Our interest in the solution was reignited recently when we encountered two clients convinced it was a breakthrough! The first was the Australian organization for which we devised the solution 15 years ago. After our engagement ended they pressed our theoretical solu ..read more

I’m not joking. The following is precisely how most executives within industrial organizations conceptualize revenue. Q. Where does revenue come from? A. From salespeople. Q. How do salespeople generate revenue? A. Um. From relationships. This conception of revenue is not even vaguely correct. And, unfortunately, this fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of revenue leads to a number of organizational design problems that, collectively, handicap growth. Cause and effect Given that revenue is the lifeblood of an organization, it’s probably worth investing a little effort to understand whe ..read more

Many of our followers’ salespeople promote an eight-minute briefing when they first engage with prospective customers. Well, I’ve created a video demonstration of an eight-minute briefing—and you can watch it below. Why an Eight-Minute Briefing? First, I should stress that there’s nothing special about eight minutes. It could just as easily be six, or twelve. The significance of the small number is that we want to highlight that this briefing has been deliberately constructed to be economical with the prospect’s time. This makes it easy to sell and, more importantly, easy for a prospect to sa ..read more

This article was first published (in a simplified form) on Thomasnet.com. You can read the original here. When young executives discover enterprise technology, their first instinct is to build a unified, organization-wide workflow. (Actually, this tendency also extends to the not-so-young!) It seems perfectly sensible. The idea appeals to the innate desire we all have for elegance (and the love we have for new technology). But in practice, more often than not, this is a mistake. What you end up with is the oversimplification of work, the destruction of information, and the generation of confli ..read more

This is a must-watch interview for Industrial Distributors. In two short years, Emasal totally reengineered its entire front-of-house. Two years ago they had 6 regional offices, each with its own sales and customer service representatives. And, two years ago, salespeople were commissioned, semi-autonomous operators, doing a mix of field and telephone work. Today, Emasal has one central customer service team and one central internal sales team. They have a couple of technical field specialists in each region, but no salespeople. Oh, and salespeople today earn salaries only. No commissions! Emas ..read more

This article was first published on Thomasnet.com. You can read the original here. If you hear a crazy idea often enough, there’s a danger that you’ll come to passively accept it — particularly if it’s on the periphery of your primary interest area. Some of these ideas (think, astrology) are harmless enough. But there’s a danger that, every now and then, one of these crazy ideas will implant itself in your mind, masquerading as knowledge, and cause you to make less than optimal management decisions. The commonly accepted idea that “sales leads are scarce” is one such idea. It’s one part o ..read more

Here is a fun and super interesting interview with Devon Gillard. Devon is the CMO of F12.net Inc, which is headquartered in Alberta Canada. F12.net Inc is a fast-growing, private-equity-backed, Managed Service Provider. In short, that means that F12 enables mid-sized organizations to outsource their core technology infrastructure (software and—notably—hardware).  As you can see from the headline, F12 has improved sales performance significantly by implementing SPE (and working with us, here at Ballistix, on the build of a new sales model). But this interview covers a lot more ground ..read more

Trust me, you don’t want your remote team members to be busy. Or, at least, you shouldn’t. You should want them to be productive. And busy and productive are two quite different things in most work environments. If you’re like many organizations, this week is the first week that a good number of your team members are working from home (due to that damned virus). And if you’re a business owner or senior executive it’s natural for you to worry that your remote team members won’t be productive. When busy DOES equal productive Now, there is one context where busy IS a synonym f ..read more

This article was first published on Thomasnet.com. You can read the original here. If you make revenue the responsibility of your sales department, you will handicap the growth of your organization. If you want your organization to grow, operations should be responsible for revenue and your sales department should focus exclusively on new business. Before we get to that, let’s unpack the idea that revenue should be the responsibility of operations. Revenue: The Responsibility of Operations If your organization is typical, it’s likely that more than 70% of your revenue in any given year comes f ..read more