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Cube Management provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results.

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Career Search Considerations for Top Salespeople
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you are in the midst of a transition and thinking about making a career change and you’re a top sales producer for your company, it can feel very risky to make a move; particularly if you’ve established a real strong track record in your job. Yet all of us reach a point when we know its time to move from a very good situation into the next phase of our career. I personally have experienced this on several occasions over the span of my professional life and I’m sure you have as well.

Dealing With Truth In The Interviewing Process
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you’re a sales professional and have had at least on career misstep, how do you deal with that when you’re interviewing for your next great job? This is an important question because we interview top sales candidates all the time and while there are many people who have had a smooth career without any bad decisions or failed startups, inevitably, most people have probably encountered some difficulty in their career along the way, particularly if they’re risk takers.

Social Networking for Your Job Search
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Social-Networking] The internet has brought some wonderful new tools over the last few years, that can help you to rapidly accelerate your job search through the use of social networking programs such as Spoke, LinkedIn, and others. These programs allow you to establish linkages between yourself and different people who you are associated with in business and in personal pursuits, and to also build your network forward and backward from a particular point in time, in terms of relationships that you’ve had over the span of your career history.

Job Seekers: Make Sure That You Do A Good Job Of Contacting Recruiting Firms
[Business:Careers-Employment] Often times we get jobseekers in the local market who submit their résumés to our firm for specific positions, but they’ve never taken the time previous to the job listing to actually post their résumé with us. This causes us to ask ourselves why job seekers are not doing a better job of contacting companies like ours that specialize in sales and marketing recruiting.

Map Your Reference Checking Process To The Job You’re Recruiting For
[Business:Careers-Employment] A lot of times when people do reference checks on candidates, they fail to adapt the reference checking process to the type of position that they’re looking to fill and therefore ask very generic questions. This fails to uncover the kind of information that you really need to have in order to understand whether or not a specific candidate is a good match with the specific job you're trying to fill.

Doing Proper Reference Checks On Salespeople
[Business:Careers-Employment] We see lots of companies that skip reference checking at the last stage of their recruiting process, before they hire sales candidates. As a result, they make mis-hires. We also have witnessed companies that realize their reference checking is inadequate, because they didn’t get to the right types of references as they made their final hiring decision.

Retained Verses Contingent Executive Search For Sales And Marketing Talent
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you’re in the process considering using a recruiting firm in order to find sales and marketing talent for your company, you may know that there are at least a couple of options out there for you to consider when it comes to the type of arrangement between yourself and an executive search firm. One is retained and the other is contingent. By retained we mean you are working exclusively with the search firm and you’re paying their fees as you go for performing those services. Contingent means that you only pay the fees at the time they successfully place a candidate in the position that you’re looking to fill.

Pursue A Career In International Sales
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you are thinking about or are interested in pursuing a career in international sales, it's a wonderful opportunity. In fact, with globalization, there's an increasing demand for people who have international skills to fill these kinds of positions. Unfortunately, most Americans of traditional descent are not aptly prepared for such a profession.

Exploring A Sales Career
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you’re a recent college graduate and are getting ready to launch your career and are thinking about pursuing the field of sales, congratulations! It’s a great profession. Here are some practical considerations that you should think about as you explore whether or not sales is right for you.

What Employers Look For In Salespeople
[Business:Careers-Employment] We’ve talked a lot about how the economy is hot right now and we’re in a full employment situation, and the fact is that what employers are looking for right now in good sales people is having a strong “hunter” profile. There are lots of different types of sales profiles out there, but the individual who is really talented and passionate about finding and closing new business, opening new accounts and generating new market share for a company provides the most value.

Inside Sales Is A HOT Career Area
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you’re a young professional thinking about how to break into a great career, you should consider a career in inside sales. Why? There’s huge demand for top sales talent in companies that span all types of industries including technology, manufacturing, healthcare, and business services. Right now, the demand for talented inside sales people far outstrips the supply. So, it’s a buyers market out there and the buyers are the employees who are shopping for the best possible career opportunity.

How To Effectively Manage Salespeople Who Are In Remote Locations
[Business:Sales-Management] If your organization has field sales personnel spread across the country or across the globe, it’s very important that you provide them with the time, attention, and management that is required in order to make them effective. We see lots of organizations that hire expensive field sales personnel only to leave them to their own devices and provide them with little supervision, guidance, mentoring, or coaching. This is a serious mistake.

Do You Need A Sales Consultant?
[Business:Sales] I’d like to talk a little bit about when companies should consider brining in an outside sales consultant in order to solve problems within their organization. Many companies reject the idea of bringing in outsiders and they have an adversity to employing consultants for any reason. I can understand this. We’ve all been burned by consultants who have “borrowed our watch in order to tell them what time it was.”

Using An International Sales Consultant
[Business:Sales] If your company wants to start selling overseas but doesn’t have the in house expertise or knowledge, you should consider hiring yourself an international sales consultant. How do you go about finding that person? Well, there are many companies that specialize in helping companies position, sell, and distribute their products internationally. You can easily find these companies using search engines or other specialized sales and marketing directories.

Follow These Steps To Take Your Company International
[Business:Management] Before you decide to start exporting your products and pursuing overseas markets, start by doing some market research and understanding where the best opportunities are for your company overseas. Do some basic homework to understand the size of markets for your products in each of the major regions of the world.

When Is It Right To Start An International Sales Program?
[Business:Sales] Many companies would like to start selling overseas but their not sure when they’re ready. One of the key components of being ready for that is preparing your organization for changes that are required in order to deal effectively and compete in the international marketplace. Many companies wait too long before they go international because they feel that they don’t have the resources required. Other companies go too fast and don’t recognize the costs involved. As a result their efforts can fail. So when is the right time? A lot depends upon the kind of company you have, the kind of market that you’re in, the kind of products that you sell, the gross margins that you earn, and the resources that you have in order to invest in international sales and marketing.

Take Your Company or Career International
[Business:Careers-Employment] We’re in the age of globalization, so if your company is not selling it’s products in the international marketplace you’re missing major opportunities and ultimately you may not remain competitive in North America.

You Don’t Need To Be An Ecommerce Company To Generate Online Leads
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Internet-Marketing] Many companies, particularly in the B2B space, who don’t have an ecommerce site mistakenly believe that because they don’t have an online transaction presence they shouldn’t be focused on generating leads through the Internet. Why is this? Well they mistakenly equate online lead generation with online sales. They are two different things.

Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late To Work On Your Sales Turnaround
[Business:Sales-Management] I’m doing a sales turnaround assessment and planning project right now for a company that’s lost a large percentage of it’s sales in the last year. The CEO has come to us and asked us to help him devise a strategy to quickly get revenues back up to their previous levels. The company is losing money and while it has scaled back on it’s employee headcount and other costs, it’s still struggling to get close to breaking even. The company needs an immediate sales fix.

Don't Blame The Economy For Poor Sales Performance
[Business:Sales] If your company’s not hitting its revenue targets and underselling its competition, it’s really easy for senior managers and executives to blame the economy. The fact is though, that the economy is very robust right now, and despite high energy prices, it’s pretty clear that the economy is going to stay on a strong track. So unless your market is in a slump, the chances are that your company needs to take a hard look at sales from the perspective of its strategy, process, and people.

What Is The Role Of Online Sales Profiling Tools In The Overall Hiring Process
[Business:Careers-Employment] A good online sales profiling tool will actually provide you with a recommendation as to whether or not you should or should not hire a particular candidate and how well they are aligned with the requirements of a specific job.

Using Online Sales Testing To Improve Sales Hiring
[Business:Careers-Employment] We get lots of questions from clients of ours about the role of online sales testing in the overall candidate selection process for hiring sales people. Many clients ask us whether or not we use these tests and what role they play. I’ll try to give you an idea of how we view them here.

What Does It Cost To Make A Sales Mis-hire?
[Business:Sales-Management] Think about how much time and energy it takes to hire a good sales person. Think about how much it costs to carry a good salesperson on your payroll, and then think about the amount of revenue needed for your company in order to help you accelerate your sales. Finally, add in the opportunity costs for your company if during a given period, particularly a long one, instead of selling a million dollars a year, you have an under performing rep. When you add in all of these factors, it’s very costly to make a mistake when it comes to hiring sales people.

Why Sales And Marketing Recruiting Is Different
[Business:Sales-Management] Our company specializes only in hiring sales and marketing people, from front line contributors, to mid-level and all the way up to the executive level. We hire sales representatives, account managers, national accounts executives, directors, and vice presidents of sales and marketing. Through that process, we’ve developed a tremendous amount of expertise in these two functional areas that most recruiters don’t have.

Using Online Sales Tests As Part of the Employment Process
[Business:Careers-Employment] With the proliferation of the Internet, it’s become quite common now for people to use online testing or profiling tools in order to further test the skills and abilities of potential sales candidates as they go through the hiring process. Many people ask me whether or not these tools are valid, and what they’re utility is.

Interviewing Salespeople
[Business:Careers-Employment] One of the most common mistakes that I see with employers and recruiters, is taking a person’s resume at face value. This is particularly fatal when it comes to hiring sales people. Why? Sales people are masters of the spin. When I see a résumé that comes to me full such spin (for example increased pipeline by 82%, doubled bookings, tripled revenue, etc), and I don’t see absolute revenue or booking figures, I become highly suspicious.

How To Search For Top Sales And Marketing Talent
[Business:Careers-Employment] Most companies follow the traditional rules of recruiting. You write a job description, you place an ad on Monster, and you hope that you receive some good résumés to look at. You then sit back and wait for candidates to come to you.

Recruiting Sales and Marketing Talent in a Full Employment Economy
[Business:Careers-Employment] It’s no secret that the economy continues to hum along and is growing at a very nice pace. Barring any catastrophe in the Middle East or any oil shock, we expect this to continue for the next few years at least. What does this mean for companies that are trying to grow their businesses? It means it’s a tough sell out there to get top sales and marketing employees to make a job change. Why? All of the good talent is already working elsewhere, and making great money!

Competing For Top Talent In A Tight Labor Market
[Business:Careers-Employment] It’s no secret that it’s a buyer’s market out there right now and the buyers in this economy are job seekers, who are in a position to be very choosy when it comes to deciding which job they take and what sort of compensation they’re going to accept. As the job market tightens, there has been a monumental shift towards the candidate being in a controlling position of deciding what sort of job opportunity to take. Every company is looking for top talent in sales and marketing for their businesses to grow. And to the extent that they can find it and retain it, they can grow. In this tight job market, traditional recruiting techniques no longer work.

Sales Performance Planning
[Business:Sales-Management] Does your company have a good sales performance planning process? Are your people on your sales team fully benchmarked against a measurable set of annual goals? Do they understand exactly what it is that they’re tasked with over the next year, to drive revenue growth for your company?

Integrating the Marketing and Sales Functions Within A Company
[Business:Management] We see many companies still suffering from the traditional struggle between the marketing silo and the sales silo inside their businesses. Is this happening in your firm? It doesn’t have to be that way. Frequently, marketing and sales spend too much time and energy competing with each other for resources and a CEO’s attention, as opposed to taking a more enlightened approach: focusing on integrating their efforts in order to optimize the company’s overall revenue growth.

Telemarketing Vendors Can’t Compete With Internal Operations
[Business:Sales-Teleselling] Lots of companies look to outsource their lead generation to telemarketing vendors that provide turnkey services for calling into prospect accounts and qualifying leads. In fact, our own company has experience providing these services to clients. I’m here to tell you today that this process of outsourcing your telemarketing to a tele-services firm probably is not a very efficient or cost effective way to do business in today’s day and age.

Capture The Power of Online Lead Generation
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:PPC-Advertising] Most companies underestimate the power of doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). As a result, their businesses are failing to capture the opportunity to drive online sales leads to their company.

Give Your Website a Facelift
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Web-Development] I’m amazed at how often we come across companies that are spending lots of money to grow their sales functions but don’t have the right marketing in place. They fundamentally haven’t got the right mix between sales and marketing investments. In particular, in the 21st Century, a company’s website is an absolutely key component of the marketing communications mix, especially since websites are now the primary vehicle for capturing and converting leads and turning them into sales prospects. Lots of companies that are trying to increase sales have outdated websites with stale messaging, poor positioning, outdated graphics, unexciting web copy and few offers or calls to action.

Why Marketing Strategy Is So Important
[Business:Marketing] As globalization continues and competition becomes ultra-fierce, now more than ever, it’s important that your company is constantly assessing and reassessing its go-to-market strategy. This strategic marketing function is something that companies often believe that they do well, but the reality is that many firms don’t have the resources in-house to do it at all.

Product Managers as a Strategic Asset
[Business:Management] As marketing budgets have dwindled, companies have cut back on Product Management as a functioning part of their organizations. Many companies have started to view product management as a luxury, yet best in class companies understand the vital roll that a product manager plays in helping a company efficiently plan, develop and launch new products and to optimize the sale of those new products through their sales channels.

How To Network Your Way Into Your Next Sales and Marketing Position
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you're a top sales producer looking to find that next great job, tap into the power of your network and make sure that you practice the same things that you do in your job, as you start looking for your next job. This may sound like foolish advice, but I see quite a few salespeople who actually start their job search and neglect to use the very tools that they used to be successful in their sales career! So this is something that you need to really think about.

If You Are Looking For A Sales and Marketing Job, Market Your Numbers
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you are a top sales and marketing candidate, then you've probably been held accountable for years and years to produce a certain result that was measurable at your previous employers. If this is you, that's great news! The fact is, when we talk to sales and marketing candidates, we never cease to be amazed by the number of people who really can't provide us with an empirical or objective record of their achievements. This is a no-no.

How To Search For A Top Sales And Marketing Job
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you're a top sales or marketing professional working in the business to business technology, manufacturing, healthcare or business services industries, I've got some advice for you on how to best go about optimizing your career search. I'm also going to talk about the job market now and the new way of looking for great positions which or often times not advertised. I'll also give you a number of other tips and tricks regarding interviewing, resume building techniques, and other useful ideas that I hope you will put to work in order to improve your ability to find that next great position that you’re thinking and dreaming about.

Take The Wish And Hope Out Of Hiring Great Salespeople
[Business:Sales-Management] If you're like most hiring managers, you may have made the mistake in the past of hiring a sales person because you had too few candidates, and as a result of that, you "wished" and "hoped" that the candidate that you did have would turn out to be a great sales performer. We all know that when we wish and hope that someone is going to turn out to be a superstar, this often comes back to bite us. I've experienced this in the past, and I know a lot of other sales managers and vice-presidents of sales who have experienced this in the past as well.

Contract & Interim Marketing Management Makes Sense
[Business:Sales-Management] Many companies over the last 5 years have been forced to cut their marketing staff and eliminate positions that were critical to their operations. Those positions include director, vice-president, and other marketing management positions including product management and product marketing. To counteract this trend and to overcome this shortfall, many companies are increasingly looking to outsource their marketing management functions to firms that can provide contract or fractional marketing managers at different levels of their organizations.

Don't Outsource Inside Sales
[Business:Sales-Management] Insource it! There are lots of companies out there offering outsourced telesales and lead generation on a pay per lead basis. Indeed, our own experience in the past in having performed those sorts of services for clients shows that there’s a large demand for that service. A better way is to bring that function inside your company where you can more tightly manage and control it.

How To Land A Top Sales Or Marketing Job
[Business:Careers-Employment] Here are a couple of things that you should think about as you’re preparing for an interview with a potential employer: First of all make sure that as you prepare for the interview, you learn as much as you can in advance about the company. What are its core markets? Which customers does it target? Who are the competitors? What is the company unique selling proposition? What is management’s vision & values? What does the leadership stand for? What is the culture about? These are all things that you should study and research prior to going into your interview.

Sales And Marketing Recruiting Business Growing Rapidly
[Business:Careers-Employment] Many of our clients have a hard time finding and retaining top sales talent. So we’re focusing on helping them through that process as an engine for growth of their companies. On the other hand we also have found that lots of top candidates are having a difficult time finding great job opportunities, and so the mission of helping people to find great work is one that’s important to us – we like helping people find great jobs.

Sales Incentive Program Design
[Business:Sales-Management] There is a process for developing sales commissions with respect to overall sales compensation that can be followed. The principles are quite easy. The variables include the amount of base salary that you pay to an individual (if any), and the percentage of total compensation that base salary represents in relationship to the incentive program itself.

Sales Incentive Compensation
[Business:Sales] Many companies struggle to put together incentive programs that truly focus their sales team on producing superior results without getting them into financial difficulties. Sales commission programs, bonuses and other recognition programs are a very difficult topic because oftentimes, the conditions under which incentives were originally set change over time. It’s very important that if you’re going to develop an incentive program for your sales people that you make it subject to change on a regular basis. Why? Because your business conditions change and the parameters around which you want to incentivize your people will change as a result.

Planning For Your Next Great Sales & Marketing Job
[Business:Careers-Employment] If you’re a sales and marketing executive with many years of experience but you’re tired of the current work that you’re doing, now is a great time to consider changing your job and looking for a new position. Searching for a sales and marketing position -- whether it be executive, mid-level or front-line has never been better than it is now, and the reason is because we’ve now reached full employment.

Marketing Your Employment Skills In The Internet Age
[Business:Careers-Employment] In today’s day and age, using the power of the internet to market yourself is an absolute must. Many candidates fail to recognize the tremendous power that is possible to be gained from using online marketing techniques in order to place their résumés and gain potential visibility from would-be searchers.

Build A Great Resume That Sets You Apart
[Business:Resumes-Cover-Letters] If you’re a top sales producer or marketing genius, and you’re thinking about making a job change, how do you start your career search and make sure that you stand out as a top candidate? Recruiters and executive search companies are always looking for the best. If you are interested in working with them, you need to understand their rules.

Recruiting Fees & Why People Gladly Pay Them
[Business:Careers-Employment] If your company is not used to paying recruiting fees to an outside firm in order to attract talent, you need to ask yourself the following question: can you afford not to pay fees, if you can’t fill a position or make a mis-hire. Not filling key sales and marketing positions when your company is trying to grow will constrain your company’s revenue growth potential.

Sales and Marketing Executive Search
[Business:Careers-Employment] The field of headhunting is a very challenging one when it comes to finding and recruiting top sales and marketing talent…whether they be executive, mid-level, sales management, marketing management or front line sales and marketing producers. Searching for these types of top candidates is no easy task. If your company is trying to find the best, make sure to bring in an experienced sales and marketing recruiter who can help you. They are worth their weight in gold, and their fees are easily justified. By outsourcing to a search firm, you can reduce your hiring time, improve the process and avoid the risk of mis-hires.

Networking for Job Searches
[Business:Job-Search-Techniques] If you are a sales and marketing professional thinking about initiating a new job search, make sure that you focus on the power of networking. If you work in sales and marketing, you already understand how important the network effect is for getting new business, or finding new prospects. So as you start your job search, use that knowledge to your advantage by developing a very strong networking plan that will multiply the number of opportunities for new positions that come towards you.

How to Improve Your Job Search if You're a Top Sales and Marketing Executive
[Business:Job-Search-Techniques] We talk to dozens of sales and marketing candidates every month as we perform executive searches for top technology manufacturing companies in the Pacific Northwest. As we talk to these individuals there are a few things that we see that candidates can do to improve their chances as they’re out networking and interviewing for job opportunities.

How To Select A Sales And Marketing Recruiting Firm
[Business:Careers-Employment] There are lots of staffing companies, executive search firms & headhunters in the marketplace. If your company is looking to hire sales or marketing talent, how can you distinguish between these different service providers to determine who will do the best job of finding you the top candidates that you need?

How To Hire Top Sales And Marketing Talent In A Full Economy
[Business:Careers-Employment] The economy is at full employment levels and it’s a real challenge if you’re trying to grow your company, to find and attract the best sales and marketing talent in this environment. No longer is it easy to place a Monster ad or put out the word to a couple of friends and expect to find qualified candidates coming to your door.

Six Steps To Sales Performance Management
[Business:Sales-Management] In today's day and age a lot of senior managers and sales managers struggle with maintaining their top line growth performance because they neglect their fundamental duties when it comes to managing the performance of their sales team. If you want to take your team to the next level, consider developing a sales performance management system that includes the following elements;

Make Your Website An Online Sales Tool
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Web-Development] In today's day and age just about every company has to have a website. It's widely accepted that if your company doesn't have a website, it's not considered credible in its market. Yet how many companies actually consider their website to be truly an online sales tool? In fact most companies spend a lot of money to design and build fancy websites but they neglect to think of how they're going to turn the website into a work horse for generating leads and online sales opportunities for their company.

Deworsification Is Bad Business
[Business:Management] Focus your business, focus your marketing. Back in the 80's, Peter Lynch, the once famous fund manager for Fidelity Investments Magellan Fund, wrote a book called "One Up On Wall Street". The book is about how great companies build themselves and how to pick great companies as an investor. One of the chapters in his book is called "Deworsification". Companies that decide that because they're good at one thing, they can do all things well and they get beyond their core competencies.

The Value Of Marketing Assessments
[Business:Marketing] What when was the last time that you took a hard look at the effectiveness of your marketing programs and decided whether or not you were really getting a good return on investments from these efforts. Lots of companies develop habits on how they spend their marketing dollars, and since we're all creatures of habit, it's really easy to be comfortable with doing the same thing over and over and over again. Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result. The question I have for you is as follows: What is your company doing to measure its marketing results and objectively assess whether or not you're getting what you're paying for from them?

How To Stop Sales Mis-Hires
[Business:Sales-Management] Just yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with a very seasoned CEO of a technology service provider who came to us in order to do a recruiting project for a new sales person. He came to us is because he's gone through four sales hires on his own and none of them have actually produced anything for his company. As we sat down to talk about this he sheepishly admitted that this had cost him millions of dollars of lost revenue and opportunity cost as a result of not getting the sales hiring process right.

How To Stop Sales Lead Leakage
[Business:Sales-Management] Most companies have the classic problem of spending money on the marketing side of the fence in order to generate leads only to see that those leads are not followed up effectively by the sales team. This classic leakage of leads to unnecessary expense and definitely inhibits a company's ability to accelerate its sales.

The Age of Outsourcing
[Business:Outsourcing] In today's day and age companies can ill afford to take on full time equivalent employees to manage functions which can be easily outsourced. In fact most businesses today, particularly in marketing, can not afford to keep a large marketing staff, but they still need to complete those vital marketing functions. Companies are going to a much more of a virtualized model and the fundamental relationship between employees and employer has changed. Companies are often using a make or buy criteria to decide what they outsource to other companies, and what are core competencies that they need to retain inside their own walls with their own employees.

How To Best Network Within Your Own Network
[Business:Networking] Do you take for granted the fact that your friends and colleagues and associates in the business community around you know what your company really does? I certainly have in the past, and everyday I'm amazed by how little people actually know about my company and what we actually do.

Direct Mail Still Works For Lead Generation
[Business:Marketing-Direct] You probably wonder why when you go home to your mailbox everyday and open it up there's dozens and dozens of postcards and other direct mail pieces sitting waiting for you everyday. If you're like me you're probably tired of having to weed all that junk mail out and drop it straight into the recycling bin before you even get inside the door of your house. Well the cold hard fact is that companies spend a lot of money on direct mail because it works. Direct mail is still a great way to get to specific prospects with a specific offer and this is no less true in the B to B space than it is in the B to C space.

How To Optimize Your Email Marketing Efforts
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Email-Marketing] The bubble has already burst on email marketing as the latest fad for touching lots of customers or lots of prospects as the lowest possible cost. Indeed over the last few years, many companies have tried and failed at successfully deploying email marketing campaigns to nurture their relationships with their prospects. Yet despite the let down and the disappointment on the part of many executives email marketing still is a very effective tool to reach your prospects and stay in touch with them so that when they are ready to make a buying decision you can convert them into closed sales.

Accelerate Sales Through Product Marketing
[Business:Marketing] Many companies shortchange themselves when it comes to marketing their products by not developing a proper product marketing function within their companies. Product marketing is a critical element of a functional organization that positions and promotes products, pushes them into the market place, and pushes them into the channels that you're trying to develop. Without proper product marketing many companies actually expend needless sales resources and support resources to try to makeup for the shortcomings of not having this function inside their company.

Telemarketing and Telesales: The Secret Weapon
[Business:Sales-Teleselling] Many companies laugh off the idea of using inside sales or telemarketing professionals in order to generate leads or close business over the phone. Yet the biggest companies and the best in class firms across just about every industry are using that as part of their arsenal in order to accelerate their sales and drive their growth. It's a lot more efficient to deploy inside sales people and telemarketing professionals than it is to use outside field sales professionals for the same function.

How To Develop Business Through Third Party Channels
[Business:Management] We see lots of companies out there that decide to go through third party channels in order to take their products to market, yet neglect to put the necessary resources and structure around building, deploying, managing, and executing this third party channel strategy. Those companies assume that by outsourcing the sales of their products of those third party channels, they don't need to invest in providing the support or infrastructure or services or training to those channel partners in order to make them a success. Well, companies that have been in the business of successfully growing their companies through third party channels know better.

Outsourcing Sales & Marketing: When Does It Work?
[Business:Outsourcing] Today, now more than ever, companies need to go outside to find partners, consultants, inter-management solutions, and service providers who can help them to cover the range of their needs of sales and marketing. As new rules have been invented regarding lead generation, the internet, and more complexity has come into the sales and business development and marketing model of most companies, it's very difficult for you to keep up with all of the skill sets that are required in order to be on the top of your company's game and maintain best practices across all of those functional areas.

Essential To Convert Leads Into Sales
[Business:Sales] Why is it that so many sales people fail to follow up on sales leads that are handed off to them by the marketing department? It never ceases to amaze me how often I hear the same complaint from sales managers and from marketing managers who are working hard to drive new opportunities in the door. Part of the issue with sales people and their lack of willingness to follow up on sales leads is many sales people have large egos and believe that anything that has been brought to them by others is probably not very good.

Sales Opportunity Management: The Key To A Sales Turnaround
[Business:Sales-Management] Does your company need a sales turnaround? As we enter the new year, it's a great time for us to take a fresh look at our sales performance in our companies and take action to turn around those aspects that we're not satisfied with or which are lagging behind our expectations. Putting together a sales turnaround plan for your company can be done fairly quickly and fairly easily.

Sales Cycle Reduction Equals Sales Acceleration
[Business:Sales-Management] What would it be like if you could reduce the time it takes you to close orders from new customers by 10, 20, or 30%? Think about how a reduction in your sales cycle could lead to rapid improvement of your sales results and your revenue generation. Many companies neglect to take time to analyze their sales cycle and look at ways to reduce it…which can be done by more clearly defining their sales process and looking for areas to eliminate lengthy steps or delays.

Your Unique Selling Proposition Must Be Unique
[Business:Sales] What's your company doing to set itself apart from all of its competition and build a sustainable competitive advantage? Many companies struggle with defining what makes them different from their competitors, even though they have core strengths that do set them apart. In today's crowded marketplaces, when prospects and customers go looking for a vendor, what usually causes them to investigate further into the possibility of buying from a specific company is what sets that company apart.

SEO What?
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:SEO] It's amazing to us that so many companies are still missing the mark when it comes to search engine optimization as a vehicle for generating leads. This is the most important guerilla marketing technique that any company can be using in today's day and age in order to generate more business for itself, yet most business owners are still skeptical about the value of good online marketing.

How To Manage Third-Party Resellers
[Business:Management] Many companies think that once they've selected resellers for their products their work is done and that it's now the reseller's job to go push the product out into the market. This is a serious error in thinking on the part of the companies that are really looking to accelerate their sales and maximize their market penetration. The best companies out there who are using resellers understand that building and maintaining effective distribution channels requires a serious commitment of resources from the company in order to make them successful and that third party channels and resellers can't do the job on their own.

How To Optimize Sales Channel Selection
[Business:Sales] So many companies sign up third party resellers and distributors and system integrators and OEMs without giving proper rigorous attention to the process that's required in order to define the selection criteria, find adequate channel partners, and actually go through a process of due diligence in order to screen them, select them, and bring them onboard. A well developed channel selection process, a reseller selection process, looks a lot like a very rigorous process for hiring and acquiring members of your senior management team or your key employees in sales and marketing.

How To Boost Sales Channel Performance
[Business:Sales] In today's day and age, a lot of companies are using third party channels for reselling and supporting their products. Those channels include OEMs, system integrators, value added resellers, manufactures reps, agents, and distributors, among others. And they are used both domestically as well as internationally to push product out through multiple channels to their target markets. Yet many companies view this channel activity as being something that's free and easy to attain and don't necessarily focus the right resources on really developing and managing the right channels that would optimize their sales performance.

Go Up Market With Your Messaging and Positioning
[Business:Marketing] Is your company's messaging and positioning caught in the same ho hum features and benefits trap that many companies face? If so, it's time to consider shifting your strategic marketing plan and going up market with your company's messaging and positioning. Doing so can have a transforming effect on your companies ability to compete and successfully win in its target markets with its target customers.

Managing Sales Mavericks
[Business:Sales-Management] Mavericks can have a huge impact on bottom line for your company, but they also can be a big drain on your organization. Often times, these mavericks won't follow the company's policies and procedures when it comes to sales process, selling methodology, reporting forecasting, using your CRM tools, etc. What do you do with these mavericks and how to you manage them to a better result?

Don't Waffle On Terminating Non-Performing Salespeople
[Business:Sales-Management] When you can see that a sales person's not performing and that you can see that they're not making steady progress in improving their sales activity and pipeline and actually closing business. The best rule of thumb is to act quickly, to let that kind of person go so that you can make room for replacing them with somebody who can be more productive.

Best In Class Sales Organizations Provide Extensive Sales Training
[Business:Sales-Training] Many companies assume that when they hire sales people that are already trained they don't need to invest in ongoing training. This is a big mistake. We see the best in class companies continuously working with their sales people to sharpen their saw and keep themselves at the top of their sales game. Sales training should become an ongoing part of your investment by sales management in upgrading and improving the skills of your sales force in order to stay competitive, learn new techniques, adapt to changing sales realities, and keep an open dialogue going between sales management and its people on how to improve sales performance.

Use Consultative Selling To Beat Your Competition
[Business:Sales] Many companies today are still trying to push features and benefits of their products on their customers without understanding the deeper needs of those prospects and how they fit with their own company's products or services. Companies that are still pushing feature and benefits, as opposed to pulling information from their clients and consulting with their clients in developing a solution, are those that are typically not able to accelerate their sales and are struggling against competition that uses a more sophisticated sales approach.

Models of Selling: Enterprise vs. Transactional
[Business:Sales] The enterprise selling model is characterized by high level of complexity. Typically, decision making cycles are long, there are multiple constituents involved in multiple locations at multiple levels of the organization. This means that deploying a sales organization in order to meet the needs of the enterprise selling model are complex, expensive, and require a heavy level of investment.

Sales Process Integration & CRM
[Business:Sales-Management] Lots of companies fail to see the connection between developing a well defined sales process that's repeatable and scalable and the actual recording of sales activity, tracking and forecasting of sales results in a customer relationship, management or CRM system, also known as sales force automation or SFA.

Web Activity Isn't Web Productivity
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Web-Development] In today's day and age, a lot of companies are investing in search engine optimization and pay per click advertising in order to increasingly drive traffic to their website. The real question is, what are they doing to convert those visitors into actual sales leads?

Use CRM To Run Sales By Numbers
[Business:Sales-Management] If you run your sales by the numbers and look at that activity on the daily and weekly basis, it's very easy for you to quickly see what patterns are emerging in your sales team performance and act accordingly in terms of zeroing in on corrective actions that need to be taken with individual team members in order to boost their overall sales results.

Work Smarter, Not Harder
[Business:Small-Business] As the new year starts, it's a good time for you to start thinking about how you can simplify how you go to market and how you sell and promote your products. To make it easier for you to get to the customers that you really want and focus all of your resources and attention on the customers that have the best potential return for you.

How To Build & Manage Effective Distribution Channels
[Business:Sales] All of these types of third party distribution channels are immediately available to many companies and can be deployed for a fraction of the cost of a direct sales force. In addition to that, the cost can be very variable and can be absorbed by the actual sales revenue as it's produced, as opposed to being up front, fixed and unavoidable when you deploy a direct field sales team or inside sales team.

Let The Sales Numbers Speak For Themselves
[Business:Sales] Ever had a sales person who spends most of their time internally trying to justify how great results are just right around the corner, spends a lot of time slicing and dicing their numbers and their forecasts and telling you over and over how an account is just about to close? Well those are the sales people who ain't going to make it.

Never Hire A "Maybe" Salesperson
[Business:Sales-Management] Here's a key idea when you're hiring sales people. The title of this is called: If the Answer is Maybe, then It's No.

The 90 Day Sales Blitz
[Business:Sales] The whole premise behind this is to rally the whole company around doing everything it can to support the sales team to close deals, expand the pipeline, get more opportunities into the forecast, and close deals that have been out there languishing for some time.

New Year's Sales & Marketing Resolutions
[Business:Change-Management] It's a great time to dust off your playbook and think about what your strategic plans are in sales and marketing for the coming year. A good way to start is to start by taking your management team through a series of new year's resolutions.

Why Telesales/ Telemarketing Deployments Fail
[Business:Sales-Teleselling] Let's talk about the fact that a lot of companies actually fail when it comes to telesales and telemarketing deployments because they fail to follow some of the key principles.

The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Telemarketing and Lead Generation Programs
[Business:Outsourcing] Let's talk about benefits of outsourcing your telemarketing and lead generation programs and the different options that are available to you if you're considering doing this.

Good Recruiting Practices Essential To Hiring Sales & Marketing Superstars
[Business:Sales-Management] In order to find really top sales and marketing talent, whether it be VP, director level, marketing manager, sales manager, down to entry level telesales personnel, you're going to have to go into your competition and find those people and extract them and get them to work for your company.

The Marketing / Sales Disconnect & Its Impact On Lead Generation
[Business:Management] Let's talk about how companies can work to improve the seamless connectedness between their lead generation activities and their sales activities. A lot of companies have many, many disconnects between the parts of the organization that actually generates qualified leads for the company, i.e. usually marketing, and those who actually convert those qualified leads into sales opportunities and close new business for the company - in other words, the sales team.

The Importance of Corporate Strategy
[Business:Management] A lot of companies that we work with spend too much time focusing on tactics and execution and not enough time really determining what their overall strategy is as a business and the impact on spending enough time at the strategic level can really have an stunting impact on a company’s overall ability to accelerate its sales, gain market leadership, and really power up its revenue growth.

The Necessity Of Strategic Marketing
[Business:Marketing] We find many companies that are expending resources trying to sell to the wrong markets against competitors who are way stronger than they are in the markets they are trying to sell into and lack of fundamental focus in this area as a result of not understanding their strategic marketing imperatives. We see companies that are selling the wrong products with the wrong people to the wrong customers and with strategic marketing planning work could fundamentally alter the odds and gain a much more solid footing in the markets where they have the best opportunity to compete to win.

How To Implement World Class Internet Marketing
[Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Internet-Marketing] Most businesses are still completely missing the boat when it comes to using the power of the internet to generate sales leads. Today the opportunity for even small business to capitalize on this opportunity is really quite remarkable.

How To Manage Poor Performing Salespeople
[Business:Sales-Management] Taking swift corrective action with poor sales performers is the key to any sales manager’s responsibilities. Nowhere is it more important than in sales to quickly take action when a sales person is not hitting their revenue targets. Management’s job is to diagnose and detect the underlying reasons for a sales person not performing and to engage in corrective action in order to correct the behavior, the activity or the results as necessary.

Recruiting & Hiring Sales & Marketing Superstars
[Business:Sales-Management] There are lots of people who get into sales and marketing for the wrong reasons. So there are a lot of people out there who actually don’t have what it takes in order to be successful at sales and marketing.

Elements Of A Successful Sales Performance Management System
[Business:Sales-Management] The components of a successful sales performance management system include first of all having well defined revenue plans and revenue and margin objectives.

Why Have A Sales Process?
[Business:Sales] Lots of company’s think of sales process as being a sales technique, such as spin selling, solution selling, or push selling or those kinds of strategies. But in fact, a sales process is completely different than that. A sales process is something that every good company needs to be able to define and master in order to boost their sales performance and accelerate their overall top line growth. Sales process really becomes, by definition, repeatable and scaleable sequence of events that yields to consistent sales results.

How Does A Company Articulate Its USP?
[Business:Sales] Companies follow different strategies in order to articulate their unique selling propositions. Often times, if a company has not gone through a go-to-market strategy or a strategic planning marketing process it makes sense to start there by gathering your team together and looking in-depth at the elements of your go-to market strategy.

Hire The Best, Weed Out The Rest: Recruiting Top Sales Producers
[Business:Sales-Management] Hiring top sales people is the key to accelerating your company’s sales. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Yet even if you agree with this, we all know from experience that finding and attracting high performance sales talent is anything but easy. Getting this right is a combination of both art and science, and requires a real commitment to excellence.

Why Internal Lead Development Departments Fail
[Business:Sales] In our last issue, I suggested... ok, strongly recommended that the best way to build sales is by adding inside lead generation to make outside sales reps more productive. That recommendation sometimes yields the response "we tried it and it didn’t work." Upon further investigation, we discover that their failure were a result of poor execution.

Telesales Success: Begin with the End in Mind
[Business:Sales-Teleselling] You may remember the following excerpt from Steven Covey's book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: "Clients often ask me, 'how can we get our inside sales team to talk to more prospects?' Sure...threats, begging, yelling, low level torture, coercion, and brut force entice reps to make more calls as long as the manager is there with his whip, but productivity plunges when the manager isn't around. I believe the motivation to expose yourself to rejection multiple times per day has to come from within."

Sometimes Team Success is About Harnessing the Power of Self
[Business] Voracity is a very powerful emotion that, if harnessed properly, can be both self-serving and profitable for any business. The secret is to find a way to create an environment where selfishness can and will serve two masters. How can that be done? I'm glad you asked!

Measure Your Marketing ROI
[Business:Marketing] There's a well-known truism in business: You get what you measure. So if you aren't measuring the results of your investment in marketing dollars—in terms of current and predicted future revenue and profit results—then essentially you're investing blindly. Let's say you follow the established norm for your industry and invest in marketing as a percentage of revenues. By not establishing a direct relationship between marketing investments and revenues, you do your organization a disservice. Your marketing efforts will be more successful if you insist that they are measured based on net contribution to the bottom line.

Using CRM to Improve Your Marketing ROI
[Computers-and-Technology:Software] Since Marketing's top priority is to generate qualified leads for Sales, management's focus should be on measuring the quantity and quality of leads which Marketing is driving into the sales pipeline, and which Sales is converting into revenue. The best place to capture and analyze this information is in your CRM (customer relationship management) system.

Linking Performance to Company Values
[Business:Sales] Intel corporate values include risk taking, discipline, and results orientation. These are exactly the values one would expect of a company whose primary strategy is one of product leadership. Without these specific company values the product leadership strategy would surely fail. In firms where the values and the strategy are tested daily it requires management oversight to ensure that they remain aligned.

Is It Time To Hit The Reset Button On Your Sales Department?
[Business:Sales-Management] If you're like most CEOs in business today, you will probably be faced with this decision at some point in the life of your organization. That time might even be now. Perhaps your sales team consistently misses quota or your market share is in decline. Perhaps lethargy and complacency have taken hold in your sales department. If so, then a "sales reset" may well be in order.

Increase Your Pipeline: Deploying the Cost Effective Sales Team
[Business:Sales-Management] As we all know from the go-go days, deploying a new sales team takes significant investment, especially if the sale cycle is lengthy. When venture investment was pouring in, I saw scores of companies spend months building and investing in a sales infrastructure before a single call was made! Their new sales VP would first start his search for regional managers who would subsequently recruit field reps. And then, after the grand sales kick off, it was 6-9 months before the first sale! This just isn’t practical for most companies, regardless of the economic environment.

The Dark Side of Management: People are Selfish and Greedy
[Business:Management] Remember why you came to work today? Was it because you wanted to get started on making your company the best and most highly respected in the nation or the world? Probably not. You came to work today in order to make money to pay the bills and hope that there is a little left over to spend on yourself. You don't re care if the company makes a profit, you really only care if YOU make a profit. Will I have more income than expenses this week? Will I be able to take a vacation? Can I afford to go out to diner tonight rather than having to eat at home in front of the television?

Beyond Traditional Marcom: Building Marketing That Sells
[Business:Marketing] When the word "marketing" comes up, most people immediately think of fancy ad campaigns and big budgets. They may make you feel good, but in today's economy, most companies can only afford to spend money on marketing programs that actually drive sales leads in the door. A tightly focused "guerrilla" marketing program, when done right, can help a company accelerate its sales at a fraction of the cost of traditional programs and campaigns.

CRM/SFA That Accelerates Sales: The Sales Process Integration Approach
[Business:Sales] Has your company struggled with Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software? If so, you’re not alone. It’s estimated that between 65 and 80 percent of all system implementations end in failure*. Sales people don’t like working with software, and each rep uses the system differently. Customer/prospect data is inconsistent and poorly maintained. Management doesn’t get the forecasting and reporting visibility that it needs. Instead of being a productivity tool, CRM systems can easily end up being a drag on sales team performance.