Signals from the Field

No sales - no business.  Weak sales – anemic business.  Sales is the life blood of business.  When sales aren’t what you think appropriate, how does a business owner or sales leader figure out why.  This article provides the top 3 reasons, in priority order, sales teams don’t meet their full potential, and provides suggestions for resolution. 

For every business, a great online presence begins with a great website. It’s the one place online you completely own and control. Therefore, it’s a pillar to being successful online.

Many small business owners long for that ever-elusive high-performing B2B sales department.  That’s not a surprise considering the frustrations and failed efforts to hire salespeople who can generate a return on investment. 

An online advertising revolution is taking place.

Outbound prospecting is important to any B2B sales program.  With warm leads, you’re asking a lot of questions to determine what problems to solve.  But, when you’re prospecting with cold leads, you better have a good story to tell.     

B2B salespeople have many opportunities to shoot themselves in the foot, and this article describes 6 things salespeople should not load into their six-shooter.  

Inbound marketing takes months, even years, to start producing meaningful results. That’s the truth.

And you can take it from us. Our firm has been blogging since 2009, we generate more site traffic than many successful ecommerce sites, and we have thousands of people download our eBooks per year.

In other words, we generate the attention most businesses can only dream of, and that alone is not enough to say we're wildly successful at inbound marketing. 

The skills that helped you start your own business are not the ones that will make you successful in the long term.  Inc. Magazine states that 96% of new businesses fail within the first 10 years.   

The salesperson's role is to acquire new clients and/or generate more revenue from existing clients.  After a deal closes, it's often passed off to an account manager of a fulfillment team.  The on boarding process and the ongoing customer experience are vital to customer retention.  Moreover, in a traditional sales model, the original salesperson may be unaware of any problems or issues until it is too late.

At a recent speaking event, I posed a question to the audience. I asked, “who here watches TV on their own time, like on Hulu or Netflix, as opposed to watching live TV on cable.”