Before there was CRM (Customer Relationship Management) there were Contact Managers (CM) and good contact management practices are neither dead nor are they old-school. The CM features that I grew up with are still valid 30 years later. Social CRM (SCRM) will now allow us to leverage our social relationships as well our traditional ones. Same rules, new tools. SCRM, in my mind,
If you mention the term “ballparking”, most sales managers will first turn a fiery red and then they will melt down completely. Why? Because, if not used correctly, it is an extremely dangerous sales tactic that can often be interpreted by the customer as being some sort of a verbal quote. Always remember that, unless
You’ve built up your book of business, your marketing is a fine-tuned lead generating machine, but are your pitches closing as many deals as they should be? For many of us in B2B sales, the opportunity lies not in generating additional prospects, but in closing more of the potential deals that already come across our
Speaking for myself, I am all about R.O.I., Return On Investment. As such, I look at my networking activities as investments rather than expenses. While I can tell you that I can credit millions of dollars in projects directly to my networking efforts, you are going to want and need to track your own results.
Techniques and tactics as well. If you have a question about virtually any aspect of selling, a simple Google search will reveal a bounty of answers and, frankly, most of them will be quite good. That’s not to say that you won’t discover a variety of totally dissenting opinions and … therein lies the rub.
Let’s talk a bit about power partners. Power partners are the secret sauce of the networking world. They can and should be a subset of every networking type group that you belong to and particularly in any leads group. They also function as a standalone networking resource. I’ll start with a true story. In 2005
