Powering Your Sales Process with Internet Marketing

In the last five to seven years Internet Marketing has been a gold rush for some entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, technologies have rapidly evolved, making it hard for B2B sellers and marketers to follow them. Those B2B marketers who have tried Internet Marketing techniques (such as Read more

Oh, Now I Get It!

Ahhh! Vacations are great. I had only half of one in the last two weeks and now that I’m back things still seem brighter and happier than before. The highlight was spending time with my wife and kids. (My daughter is in high school, Read more

What Sales Process Behavior Charts Can Tell You

Dear Readers, Thank you for the excellent remarks about what process behavior charts can tell you from last week’s blog post. For convenience, I have reproduced the image here (with interpretation below).

Figure 1 - Sales Process Behavior Charts

Looks like while they are closing, they are not also prospecting…and unfortunately I see B2Bs do this frequently. This is by far one of the single biggest headaches that drives CEOs crazy as it adds a degree of variability that hits home where it hurts…in cash flow.

Bingo!

Sales Production Bottleneck

In many companies, salespeople are required to be involved in everything, so they are the bottleneck. Read more

Building A Negotiation Strategy Into Your Sales Process (members-only)

By Michael Webb and Brian Deitmeyer Whether you are in a recession, or in a healthy economy, it pays to have a sales process designed specifically to enhance your negotiating position. In a recession, purchasing departments can more easily initiate bidding wars and reopen negotiations with suppliers, Read more

How to Map Customer Value

So Customers Will Buy Now and Pay More

Michael Webb presents Customer Value Mapping, a technique that has been applied in more than 100 client companies to tailor sales training materials and enable marketing departments to design better sales processes and collateral materials. This presentation outlines the foundations of value propositions, and how Read more

Need More Traction with Prospects?

Why Prospects Don’t Understand Your Value – And What You Can Do About It

All too often businesses launch products, promotions, and proposals that do not achieve their goals. When that happens, cost of sales goes up and confidence goes down. Everybody has to work harder. Years ago I saw that happen multiple times at a Read more

How to Generate and Sustain a 25% Increase in Sales Opportunities in 90 Days or Less with Sales Kaizen

by Michael Webb with Brian Carroll

Introduction

The current economic crisis only amplifies a hidden secret many companies struggle with: lead generation. Perhaps they don’t know how to generate leads, or they cannot get the support they need from the rest of the organization. Whatever Read more

How Product and Marketing Managers Can Increase Sales in a Frustrating Market (Shh! It’s Lean-Six Sigma. Pass It On!)

By Michael J. Webb and Robert Ferguson An executive from a top three scientific instrument company called me a year or so ago. His product management team was struggling with a variety of challenges. See how many of these have a familiar ring to you:

Read more

How to Design a Sales Process Guidebook Launch

A Starter Guide on How to Design a Sales Process

Michael Webb and Robert Ferguson demonstrate many years of experience in this powerful synopsis of their approach for designing B2B sales processes, and getting them implemented successfully. This presentation introduces the fundamental principles required for effectively managing and improving any sales and marketing process. This makes a powerful Read more

How to Design Your Sales Process to Help Customers Buy Now

Everyone’s attention these days seems to be riveted on sales.

And rightly so, given the economy. Recently I received inquiries from several people working with a large organization that is very concerned about its sales process. Seems the CEO is having difficulty telling Wall Street where next quarter’s revenues will be.

No surprise there! The economic crisis affects large and small companies: everyone needs to know where next month’s revenue will come from.

Forecasting sales has always been difficult, but, in a threatening market like this, the problem is compounded by the need to get enough people to buy in the first place!  This is a scary challenge, especially with the state of the sales process in most organizations. Ask yourself:

• How much thought went into the design of your company’s sales process?
• Was your sales process designed for the kind of market we have today?
• Does anyone really care how a salesperson got the business, so long as they actually get it?

If you are like most companies, the answers to those questions are:

• “It wasn’t ‘designed’; someone just sort of did what seemed to work at the time”
• “No”
• “Nope!”

So, with the sales process so much in the spotlight, what are you supposed to do? How can you figure out what changes will have the right effects? How can you get everyone to realize that improving the sales process is the solution?

On Thursday of this week, Robert Ferguson and I will present the first of two initial webinars around design principles and tips you need to make your sales flow like water – and get results fast. Part one is this Thursday, February 19:

“How to Design a Sales Process

For Customer Value and Continuous Improvement"

Guidebook Launch Webinar
Thursday February 19, 2009, 3:00pm Eastern Time
http://www.salesperformance.com/member-services/feb-19-webinar

Visit that page now, and register for this unusual and timely event.

Part two will be next Thursday, February 26. More on that event soon.

Michael J Webb
February 17, 2009