The last few months have undoubtedly been difficult ones for salespeople and businesses in general. While 71% of corporate buyers have looked for new suppliers in the last 12 months, the recession has caused them to re-assess their suppliers, to improve their negotiating position and gain year-on year-savings – these are amongst the findings of the 5th edition of TACK’s Buyers Survey.

Buyers’ views of salespeople 2010: earning buyers' trust finds that buyers today are seeking to measure supplier performance and, where appropriate, evaluate their commercial relationships with key suppliers. They wish to deal with salespeople who are well informed, proficient, quick to respond, able to negotiate a bespoke solution and, importantly, people they feel they can trust.

The views of one anonymous buyer cited by TACK emphasise the current mood: ‘No changing of titles will change most buyers’ or procurement officers’ views of sales teams who operate “dubious practices”.

We talk to retail agency JudgeGill about the importance of plugging physical stores into social marketing strategies.

First we had social networking and Web 2.0. Now the retail equivalent of Sales 2.0 is emerging: the latest buzzword on the high streets is ‘Social Retail’.

Retail and experience design agency JudgeGill has produced a blueprint for a ‘next generation’ retail environment that embraces two major online marketing trends being driven by social media – social networking and so-called ‘crowd-sourcing’. 

It was a bumper night for the Royal Mail at one of the main events celebrating the achievements of Britain’s sales profession. The troubled public sector giant picked up no less than three winner’s awards at the British Excellence in Sales and Marketing Awards (BESMAs) held at the Lancaster London hotel on 27 May.

Organised by the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management, the awards ceremony also proved a successful event for Royal Liver’s Progress team which took home two awards, while other winners included Virgin Media Business, Pareto Law and Huthwaite, whose managing director Tony Hughes picked up a lifetime achievement award. All the BESMAs were awarded folowing a rigorous judging process by senior sales professionals held at the Ashridge Business School.

The judges said that the key requirement for finalists was to ‘prove that they met the criteria set for their category, which reflects performance against responsibilities and skills for each role’. At the same time, ‘selling is increasingly becoming a highly professional, skilled and ethical discipline – more and more companies are setting up sales academies according to the ISMM’s qualifications, for example – and the BESMA winners and runners-up are top achievers in their key roles’ according to the organisers.

How the sales team at US company Endevco transformed performance through a new management approach.

Endevco Corporation, headquartered in San Juan Capistrano, California, is the world’s leading designer and manufacturer of dynamic instrumentation for vibration, shock and pressure measurements. It has earned a reputation for providing mission-critical performance for the most challenging aerospace, automotive, defence, industrial, and medical applications where accurate and reliable data is absolutely vital. Part of the international aerospace and defence group Meggitt plc, Endevco has been in existence for over 60 years, having grown from a small research and development firm to an international corporation, supporting customers with a global network of manufacturing and research facilities, sales offices and field engineers.

Endevco’s sales operation is largely resourced by external representatives employed by 13 different firms in the US and 15 across Europe. A direct sales team of six regional sales managers in the US and five in Europe reports into the director of sales and marketing.

During the last quarter of 2008, Endevco’s senior management identified the need to increase sales and margins as one of three top-priority improvement projects that, along with those in other divisional companies, were given high visibility at group level.

The world’s most prestigious investment bank... a French maths whizz-kid turned New York and London trader... alleged deception of clients that has attracted the attention of the regulatory authorities and the ire of the public – the Goldman Sachs scandal has got it all. ModernSelling.com rounds up a case that is sure to have dramatic consequences for the financial services sector.

City watchdog the Financial Services Authority (FSA) announced today that it too is to investigate top-dog Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Moral bankruptcy

At the weekend, prime minister Gordon Brown said he was shocked at the ‘moral bankruptcy’ exposed by the case being brought by US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which announced last Friday that it was prosecuting Goldman Sachs for an alleged $1bn fraud that eventually played a part in bringing down the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

In the first of a series of articles, Andrew Dugdale evaluates the business impact of sales training and hiring.

Salespeople, as we are constantly told, are the single biggest asset of a business. Yet, are they becoming a significantly less-effective asset in desperate need of care and maintenance?

Consider the ‘today scenario’ in most businesses and you will find that a number of significant changes have taken place during the current financial upheaval, many of which are here to stay.

The digital age doesn’t spell the death of ‘offline’ marketing, argues ROBERT KEITCH of the Direct Marketing Association.

Research recently published by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has highlighted the fact that consumers continue to rate email as their preferred channel for receiving marketing messages. According to the findings of the 2009 Marketing GAP Report, 51% of consumers state that email is their favoured means of being contacted by companies, pushing direct mail into second place with the support of 38% of consumers.

Evangelists of digital marketing will probably cite this statistic as confirmation that online channels are usurping the more traditional modes of direct marketing. However, dig a little deeper into the GAP report and you’ll find that the rise of email is most certainly not the death knell for direct mail. The overall popularity of email has actually dropped 5% since 2008, but direct mail’s popularity has risen by 6% over the same period of time. Indeed, as the study reports, when it comes to promoting things like supermarkets and shops, direct mail remains the preferred medium by which consumers like to be contacted.

In the third of a series of short articles setting out seven realistic and effective strategies for maximising revenue this quarter, Fiona Challis explains how to turn on your revenue tap.

Strategy 4 – Identify your revenue tap and turn it on

There are two main ways to gain increased revenue by the end of the financial year: first, you have your existing customers that you can gain additional spend from; and, secondly, you have new business customers.

The best approach for you to take and focus your time and efforts on will be heavily dependent on the products and services you sell. However, before you decide on the course to take I would urge you to consider the following....

In the second of a series of short articles setting out seven realistic and effective strategies for maximising revenue this quarter, Fiona Challis underlines the importance of introducing a prime selling time.

Strategy 3 – Introduce a prime selling time

In sales it is simple, the more customers you talk to, the more likely it will be that you will hit target. For me this is a ‘no-brainer’; however, I see so many who are actually spending a lot of their time on non-sales-related activities and in the prime business hours they are doing admin instead of calling the people who can help them to hit target – their customers.

In a series of short articles, Fiona Challis sets out seven realistic and effective strategies for maximising revenue this quarter. Here are the first two points to consider....

Strategy 1 – Are your salespeople working harder or smarter?

Work harder or work smarter? The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

With many companies’ financial year ending in March, the pressure is on this quarter to generate as much revenue as possible. There is no time for slacking, and managers want to see their teams being productive and taking positive action each day towards achieving team targets.

However, despite this increased pressure to perform, are your salespeople really taking positive action that will actually help them achieve targets or are they simply keeping busy?

The new collaborative selling environment demands innovative ways of measuring performance, setting targets and designing incentive plans. Performance targets, incentive plans and performance measures cannot be considered in isolation as they are highly interrelated, recent research from CRANFIELD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT has found.

Cranfield today (2 December) unveiled a new framework designed to support organisations in the target-setting process. Called the ‘Cranfield target-setting wheel’ it aims to help businesses ‘transform their existing performance management and incentive systems to reflect the sales environment that staff operate in and establish targets that will generate the expected behaviours’.

Today’s B2B prospects may have access to overwhelming amounts of information, but now more than ever they are looking for intelligence they can trust to help them make the right choices, says Bob Apollo of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners.

B2B (business-to-business) vendors can’t expect to succeed in our new world of increasingly well-informed prospects simply by ‘selling harder’.  They clearly need to sell and market smarter – and to facilitate their prospect’s decision-making journey.

Successful B2B sales people – and the marketers who support them – have to become trusted advisers who are able to help their prospects to solve problems, simplify complex choices, and manage change.

Can you imagine what is like to be overwhelmed by floods of cold calls every single day? Welcome to the world of the ‘decision-maker’....

We all believe in the product or service we sell. Or we should do if we deserve to be selling it!

But that belief clouds our vision: we assume that everybody will be just as enthusiastic about our offering as we are. All we need is ‘two minutes of the prospect’s time’ to make our case and then they’ll be grateful...

Peter Brook discusses whether outsourcing is a viable alternative to costly in-house sales teams.

What does the Echinacea plant and the outsourcing of sales teams have in common? The answer is really quite simple, they are both known for their properties of relieving stress.  

As Diageo Plc chief executive officer (CEO) Paul Walsh commented in the foreword to my book, ‘For me marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin – co-dependent – and if you get the strategies and execution for both to be brilliant then your business will undoubtedly grow’.

As we face economic uncertainties with sporadic consumer confidence, having a business model that provides flexibility while delivering outstanding activity at the point of purchase is critical.

World-class sales organisations don’t just do one or two things well; they do everything better. The most successful organisations maintain a high level of performance across all of the selling and sales management activities required to support the sales process.

That’s one of the major conclusions of Miller Heiman’s latest benchmark survey which saw almost 4,000 sales professionals contribute to its sixth annual study of the trends, issues and opportunities in a complex selling environment. The 2009 Sales Best Practices Study focuses on the selling and sales management activities that have the greatest impact on producing results.

Colin Coulson-Thomas reveals how some companies manage to charge higher prices for their products and services than others.

As recession starts to bite, many suppliers feel under pressure to slash their prices. Some may have scope for sharing the benefits of falling raw material costs with customers. Yet panic reactions and excessive reductions may prevent investments in securing longer-term competitive advantage.

Pricing decisions impact directly upon sales revenues and profitability. At any point in the economic cycle charge too much and orders are lost, while charging too little erodes margins and may give the impression that offerings are of low quality.

Obtaining and sustaining higher prices – particularly relative to competitors – ought to be a top priority of entrepreneurs. Yet often they agonise over perfecting what is sold and then take quick pricing decisions based largely on guesswork.

Setting prices

So how should businesses set prices? In the past pricing was largely shrouded in mystery. Firms have either been reluctant to reveal their approaches or sensitive to the lack of rigour involved.

A research team led by the author has persuaded 73 companies to reveal their pricing strategies, tactics and practices. The firms surveyed provided data on 127 factors that could affect pricing decisions. Set out in the report Pricing for Profit*, the findings reveal that more effective pricing could boost the profitability of many companies.

Commission schemes are on of the most emotive aspects of a salesperson’s business life: how they’re structured determines take-home pay and bonuses and can be a powerful motivational force in driving the team forward.

Steve Young of Winning Pitch exposes seven wasteful marketing practices and explains how lean thinking can bring you more profit with less budget.

While companies have ‘streamlined’ their factory floors and operations as the credit crunch continues to hit hard, few have dared to put sales and marketing under the same scrutiny – usually for fear of what they might find. However, in the vast majority of sectors, there is a huge amount of waste in marketing, which few companies have even noticed, let alone tried to address.

Competitive advantage

In today’s economic climate, your only real competitive advantage is to learn faster than your rivals. This is a quality you need to see at every level – and especially in sales and marketing, from where your new business should be driven.

Marketing more efficiently would, clearly, save costs and the impact of these savings on net profit could be far greater than you ever imagined. If a company making 3% profit margin managed to save 3% on costs in that year and retain the same level of sales, it would have the same effect on the bottom line as a doubling of turnover.

ICDL’s Andrew Dugdale asks why the selling community is so confused about sales effectiveness.

Almost inevitably ‘no’ is the answer to the question ‘Are two head better than one?’ when talking about sales headcount… especially in light of recent evidence from consultants IDC showing that, on average today, between 1.5 -2.2 salespeople are employed to deliver the same results that could be achieved with one fully effective salesperson, is it any wonder that CEOs (chief executive officers) are looking at the sales function with ever-increasing interest.

The so-called Dragons from BBC’s Dragons’ Den like to strike terror into the hearts of the business start-ups pitching for their hard-earned cash. But they’re pussycats at heart... and very free with advice for budding entrepreneurs. Here are some of the Dragons’ best tips: all are equally applicable to the sales arena as they are to the fledgling business.

General Manager of SCI Sales Group, Andy Hollands offers an essential guide to selecting a sales outsourcing company.

ONE 

Spend time researching and interviewing prospective sales outsourcing companies – their people will be at the coalface of your business and will be representing it to potential customers – so make sure you meet the sales team they are proposing. Ideally, the company should have at least 3 years’ experience, so ask for references from previous clients.

If you want to optimise the performance of your organisation’s sales function, first of all you’ve got to ask the right questions. Bill Jackson of AchieveGlobal provides a checklist.

1 Define your company’s value proposition

What is the range of products and services you want to invest selling resources on in order to bring value to your customer? What do you want your sales professionals to focus on selling?

2 Segment your market

Which customers have the highest potential to invest in your products and services? Who needs most of what you are selling? Who values your participation throughout their buying-decision process? Should customers be placed in channels according to their relative potential value?