Sales Management Newsletter

The first five minutes of a sales meeting is like the foundation of a house – get it right and everything else falls into place fairly smoothly. Bungle it, and you'll find forward progress is impossible without first repairing the damage. Clearly, your pre-call planning should include time devoted to these first crucial minutes of the meeting. But what should you be thinking about? In his book Rain Making (Adams, 2008), Ford Harding, president of Maplewood, New Jersey-based Harding & Co.,...read more.

The business lunch: simple, right? You make reservations, you order your food, you bond over the minestrone, and by the time the crème brùlée is served, you and your prospect have found you have several things in common on which you can build your relationship. Not so fast, warns Lynda Goldman, a business etiquette and communications consultant for large corporations. The seemingly straightforward task of going to lunch is fraught with pitfalls into which many reps unwittingly fall. In the process,...read more.

Picture this: your VP of sales calls all his managers into the conference room and says that for the next six months each manager is allowed only one metric by which to manage his or her team's performance. The choice of metric is yours, but you only get one. Which would you choose? For Lee Levitt, director of IDC's Sales Advisory Service, the choice is an easy one: pipeline coverage. "Pipeline coverage is a canary in a coal mine," he says. "It gives you advanced notice that things are changing....read more.

At a time when global markets are more competitive than ever and U.S. firms are struggling with an economic slowdown, the financial success of major companies will rely even more than before on the effectiveness of their sales forces. How are those sales organizations doing? Are companies "hitting the spot" in terms of enabling the level of sales performance to which they have aspired for several years? Deloitte's 2008 Strategic Sales Compensation Survey, cosponsored by Oracle, provides some answers....read more.

If Sales says, "potato" and Marketing says, "Po-tah-to," should they just call the whole thing off? No way, say the folks at Marketo, a San Mateo, CA-based company that helps sales and marketing organizations work together to drive revenue. Marketo just announced an on-demand software solution called Lead Insight for Sales that helps companies' sales and marketing departments work collaboratively to identify and interact with the best sales leads. The solution aims to solve a pervasive and expensive problem....read more.