Archive for November, 2009
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Nov 30, 2009
1 CommentFeel the CRM
I saw this article in CIO Magazine about Salesforce, and especially Marc Benioff. We sent some people to the Dreamforce event as well, and we had some good ideas come out of it. I also went through some hiring recently and all the good qualified candidates had used Salesforce. More and more, it is the...
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Nov 26, 2009
No CommentsSales and IT spending rebound
I saw an interesting Goldman survey on an IT spending rebound (through Dave of Doom). Some customers recently told me the same thing – they put a slightly different spin on it. A lot of their spending was delayed upgrades, add-on capabilities, and more infrastructure spending. In the survey, increased dollars were going to...
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Nov 24, 2009
No CommentsCommissions are contracts?
I read in New York Magazine about the mechanisms behind the scenes about traders at bailed-out AIG. A big part of the article was discussing how bad the loss of key traders was to the unwinding of the AIG contracts. These people needed to get paid a lot, or you could not attract the talent...
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Nov 22, 2009
No CommentsShout out!
We use Leadlander all the time – a great tool to help you see what domains are on your site. They’ll send you a quick email every morning on your territory – you can even log in to do some searches. The newest thing they added were links to Salesforce. Everyone already uses Salesforce, so...
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Nov 22, 2009
No CommentsThose “customized” demos
We were talking to a potential SE candidate one day – she was big on customized demos. She explained how every demo she did was built for the specific needs for her customers. Another SE, working at our company, assured us that they were all customized already. Geez, they had just done a 6-hour demo...
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Nov 17, 2009
No CommentsForecasting for you
Forecasting kinda sucks. No one really has control of our customers – I don’t believe any one of us can make them buy. Still, we should have some idea when they will buy, right? Here’s another way to look at it – treat forecasting as a part of your selling process. Forecasting is a way...
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Nov 17, 2009
No CommentsPackaging it up
“Solution selling” is a term that almost has no meaning anymore. Everyone I interview has read a book about it, trained in it, and always does it no matter what. I pushed it a lot for a while – sell the solution, do not focus on the products that go into it. Think about the...
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Nov 15, 2009
No CommentsTake it away?
One opp this week was particularly frustrating. This company uses 3 of our products in the IT side of the house. One of our products can also be used for help desk / service desk. We had a shot at winning their whole service desk business, but they went with a bigger, well-known company. They...
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Nov 15, 2009
No CommentsHiring for the job, not for you
Recently went through a search for a new salesperson. I usually aim to hire someone that is a reference – it always works better. This time, I just did not have anyone. We cast the net pretty wide — I spoke to a ton of people. The process helped me find the right person –...
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Nov 06, 2009
No CommentsWhat I learned in Sicily…
Had a great vacation in Sicily – the history, the food, the ruins, and even the wild dogs running around Palermo were all great. I even picked up some valuable ideas about getting control in your sales cycle. This one hotel where I was staying was in a great location in Taormina, but the service...
