Over the past eight years I've spent over 7,000 hours training salespeople, and I have observed the same thing: disused CRMs littered across sales operations. So what's the problem? (asks Michael McGowan)
1 CommentsBefore you read further, let me get a couple of things straight out in the open. Firstly, no CRM is perfect for everyone. Second – and brace yourselves for this – sales people are not perfect either...
22 CommentsThe good news is that the majority of IFAs now have a direct website, the bad news is that very few of those sites will ever support their sales efforts or produce a real business benefit - and the situation is the same for most sellers. So how can sales professionals put their websites to work?...
2 CommentsMarketing and PR firm Context has teamed up with marketing automation specialist Profunnel to offer clients a one-stop lead generation service that will complement existing media relations and communications programmes.
0 CommentsB2B sales leads experts Prospectvision have announced a major expansion of their services. Three new product plans, Lite, Pro and Enterprise, are launched by the company today, enhancing Prospectvision's reputation for generating qualified sales leads from website visitors. And pricing plans start from as little as £50 per month.
7 CommentsSales performance improvement company Silent Edge is celebrating reaching the finals of the European Call Centre Awards, to be announced next week.
0 CommentsRadio communications company Team Simoco, has appointed Profunnel to provide sales lead-generation and marketing automation software for its global operations, it announced on 9 August.
0 CommentsFranchise dealers should redoubling their efforts to sell service plans to make the most of the five-year warranties being introduced by some manufacturers.
0 CommentsAs part of a new training initiative, Huthwaite International has launched Sales Toolbox to deliver a range of online support tools for salespeople and their managers. These are designed to reinforce the behaviour improvement specialist’s established SPIN Selling and Account Strategy training methodologies.
0 CommentsThis month sees the European launch of the smallest-ever BlackBerry. Called the BlackBerry Pearl 3G or the Pearl 9100, it is the first Pearl to support 3G and 802.11n wi-fi.
0 CommentsTraditional prospecting techniques are becoming less and less effective as decision-makers and buyers continue to hide behind voicemail, email open rates decline and consumers take advantage of legislation to opt out of receiving direct mail and telemarketing calls at home. Yet, in business-to-business sales, we still need to have a dialogue with buyers in order to sell complex solutions.
1 CommentsHere at ModernSelling.com we recently flagged up poor qualification of leads as the number one mistake made by sales professionals. Accurate, reliable information about the sales pipeline is crucial to the success of any business and now a new online qualification tool aims to eliminate wasted time chasing poor prospects.
0 CommentsSo-called ‘social selling’ signals an end to cold calling – that’s the view of global business news and information services company, Dow Jones. Instead, sales professionals can take advantage of a suite of tools that automatically identifies reasons to call companies and connect to prospects with a real need.
0 CommentsA new era of ‘customer managed relationships’ is set to replace traditional customer relationship management (CRM), which is in deep trouble, delegates at the Gartner CRM Summit in London heard last year (2010). Andy Hamer comments today.
The battle for communications device supremacy intensified between consumer-focused Apple and business-centric BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion with the unveiling of RIM’s answer to the iPad on 27 September. The company showed off the new tablet computer at its DEVCON developer conference in San Francisco.
Apple this week unveiled the latest version of its iconic iPhone – now a wi-fi video phone – complete with an all-new design and hailing it as the thinnest smartphone ever. The iPhone 4 will be available in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan on 24 June.
Meanwhile, the new Retina display, the highest-resolution display ever built into a phone, offers ‘super crisp text, images and video’. The iPhone 4 also features a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, HD video recording, Apple’s A4 processor, a three-axis gyro and up to 40% longer talk time, all built into ‘beautiful all-new design of glass and stainless steel that is the thinnest smartphone in the world’.
It runs on iOS 4, the newest version of the ‘world’s most advanced mobile operating system, which includes over 100 new features and 1,500 new APIs for developers’. iOS 4 features multitasking, folders, enhanced mail, deeper enterprise support and Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform.
How many people do you know who have made or continue to make decisions on sales training, system implementation and sales strategy without first looking at the bigger picture? That’s the question being asked by Alan Timothy, boss of sales technology company i-snapshot.
He reckons you’ve probably seen this sort of thing happening quite often and that, apart from on a few fortunate occasions, these decisions have been quite costly to the business without leading to much success. The problem is that it’s precisely these choices which have not been well thought-through that really do give sales tools or solutions a bad name, resulting in current business rules of thumb like ‘90% of training only lasts 90 days’ and ‘50% of CRM (customer relationship management) projects fail’.
Newspapers and television are set to undergo some far-reaching changes this year, as new technologies pave the way for changes in how people receive and access information. Accountants BDO point to a continuing shift online by the media industry.
Partner and head of TMT in the firm’s Southampton office, Paul Anthony told ModernSelling.com: ‘Newspapers are having to revise their business models in order to meet changing consumer demands.’
He added: ‘This requires investment and long-term planning. The stronger well-capitalised players will be able to re-invent their offerings while the weaker, more highly leveraged players will find it more difficult. It may also be the case that, if we have a change of government in 2010, a new and more flexible regulatory regime could alter the playing field.’
Amid signs of economic recovery, 2010 will be the year when mobile operators worldwide protect their existing revenue channels while exploring new ones, says technology company Synchronica’s chief executive officer Carsten Brinkschulte.
Data services will play an even more important role in 2010, supported by an enlarged mobile messaging landscape that, in addition to SMS, will also encompass mobile email, mobile social networking, and instant messaging (IM). Contrary to many analysts’ belief, the device platform landscape will not consolidate, but further diversify as new platforms like Maemo, LiMo and Android take their market share.
As the battle between operators, device manufacturers, and internet portals for value-added services (VAS) intensifies, operators will play their strongest card - their billing relationship with the user.
How a Canadian publishing giant is boosting the effectiveness of its sales team with the help of a British field sales reporting system.
Canadian regional magazine and newspaper publisher, Metroland Media Group is to implement a revolutionary field sales reporting system, in a move designed to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of the field sales force working for its Gold Book directory division.
Marketing director at Seelogic, Mark Woodbridge points out that, when choosing CRM systems, it makes sense to take a step back and consider what your business really needs.
Alcohol, in moderation is good for you, but too much fixes nothing. Equally Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are fantastic at solving specific business issues; just don’t expect them to fix everything.
Certainly don’t fall for the line that XYZ CRM solution from ABC Ltd will increase your business by 25% and reduce your marketing costs by half.
A sales force automation or CRM system can turn into an expensive white elephant if the implementation is not handled properly. Editor Nick de Cent offers some advice.
IT consultants Gartner confirm what we always knew in terms of implementing sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions – keep it simple if you are actually expecting the team to use the system.
The recently released report Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation 2007 says: ‘We see a focus on simplicity as a theme to improve adoption among salespeople. Specifically, limiting required input data fields and user interface screens enables salespeople to navigate using the SFA application.’
Before laptops and Blackberries a salesperson's most important asset was the Rolodex. More recently, contact management systems such as Act and Goldmine, and CRM systems like Salesforce.com have begun to change how salespeople work, declares Mark Patron.
Today, a company's most important asset is often its marketing or customer database. As databases, contact management and CRM systems become linked together and, with companies increasingly selling direct, does this represent a threat or an opportunity for salespeople?
To understand how companies use their databases, we should first look at direct marketing. David Ogilvy - perhaps the greatest advertising man of all time - summed up direct marketing?s role quite succinctly: 'We sell. Or else.'