Ideas
How Good Is Your Front Of House?
One of the most interesting parts of a consultant’s job is visiting different organisations and seeing how strongly the way they organise their reception and switchboard reveals how customer centric the wider business actually is... more
How Value Chains Mature – The Dangers of Creeping Commoditisation
Many organisations are dealing with the issue where parts (all?) of their market-place are commoditising... more
Are Your Salespeople IT Literate?
We are all users of technology, however many salespeople have huge gaps in their IT literacy, having developed ‘coping strategies’ to get by... more
The Current Market Conditions – Opportunity Or Problem?
Does the current economic turbulence create problems or opportunities? Both depend on your circumstances and your point of view. How can you affect both to your advantage?... more
Are You In The Zone?
We are all familiar with being in our Comfort Zone, but what about the other performance/behaviour zones that can help you focus on being more effective and understand why you feel like you do when performing at certain levels... more
A Look Into The Current Workplace – How First Impressions Still Count For Older Workers
Last month we looked at how younger people can get it right or wrong in the workplace through their appearance and (non) verbal dexterity... more
Why Everyone Can’t Be Talented And How Some Organisations Deal With The Opportunity
Given a standard distribution curve, the amount of really talented managers in business is going to be relatively small. The bulge of managers (as opposed to a manager’s bulge) will be around the middle, classified as average... more
What Every Business To Business (B2B) Organisation Is Trying To Achieve
When all the strategies have been written, all the workshops attended, and all the board meetings or management meetings sat through, what all B2B businesses are trying to achieve is the same thing... more
A Look Into The Current Workplace - Why Some Young People Still Don’t Get How To Increase/Reduce Their Credibility Through Appearance And Speech
The younger you are the more appearance will contribute to your credibility (or not). The older you get the more licence you obtain in being individual or weird, depending on taste... more
What Will You Do With Your Extra Day?
On Friday you have an extra day, the leap year has arrived to give you more time. How could you productively use these 24 hours?... more
10 New Sales Resolutions That Will Improve your Business Performance (For Sales Directors)
1.
Stop/reduce Managing and start/increase Leading... more
10 New Year Resolutions That Will Improve Your Business Performance (For Sales Managers)
1.
Stop believing that a mediocre person is better than a vacancy. It institutionalises average as being acceptable. Improve the person’s performance or change the person... more
10 New Sales Resolutions That Will Improve Your Business Performance (For Salespeople)
1. Speak to a difficult customer you have been putting off talking to. Our analysis shows salespeople are more likely to talk to customers they like before ones they don’t, regardless of the business opportunity... more
Some Inspirational Reading/Viewing for Christmas
For one of the most effective lessons in tactical leadership you’ll ever experience, use your Christmas holiday to either read the book or watch the DVD box set of Band of Brothers... more
The SalesPathways 2007 Service Awards
During our 2007 travels we have experienced many different levels of service. We thought it was timely to mention the stand out ones we have been lucky enough to experience during the year... more
Performance Management At Christmas
How come Christmas always works? The answer is Father Christmas’s Performance Management System is built on fundamental best practice principles... more
Using Assessment / Development Centres (ADCs) To Improve Performance
It’s no coincidence that sales excellence and the use of ADCs are highly correlated... more
Speed To Competence – No Faster Way To Impact Results
Think of a new sales appointment. How quickly will they be able to reach the minimum level of productivity and results you require to constitute their appointment a success?... more
Training Sales Managers To Coach Without Context Will Not Deliver Improved Results
“We are all coaches now” said an International Sales Director at a recent conference. Later at the same event a new Performance Management system was introduced that required managers to sit down with their people twice a year and complete an on-line appraisal... more
What Should Keep The CEO Awake At Night?
It’s not what the competition are doing, or whether the business is compliant or not, or the weather, it's something that has crept up on business in the last 10 years without many people noticing... more
Hands Up Who Gets Marketing?
Ask that question in an FMCG business and there would be a strong showing. Ask it in many B2B businesses and the response would be far patchier... more
Eleven Business/People Orthodoxies – Where Do You Stand?
1. Command & Control Management Style. Management gurus and business schools have for 20 years been saying the modern organisation needs to be run on different lines, so why, apart from some notable exceptions (which tend to be start-ups), is it so slow in changing? ... more
The Steps To Building Effective Sales Reward Schemes
Sales Incentive schemes are one of the most important sales tools to get right and it’s one of the most likely to be got wrong. Here we provide a do and don’t list to help to design/check your own scheme... more
The Differences Between Traditional and Enterprise Wide Selling
This month we thought a table you can print out and take to the beach could act as a provocative thought starter... more
Our Version Of The Newspaper Silly Season
We thought you might enjoy some stories we’ve heard over the last 12 months as to why business targets haven’t been met, smile inducing unless you are paying the wages... more
The Trend Continues - (Some) Field Salespeople Are An Endangered Species
It should come as no surprise to read last weeks announcement that the pharma giant Merck is planning to lay-off a large part of its salesforce. Saying that they can create more sales momentum from other channels such as product marketing, brands and sales promotion is becoming a common refrain... more
What Are The Circumstances Where B2B Field Salespeople Can Flourish?
Given the challenges some sales organisations face (see ‘The Trend Continues - (Some) Field Salespeople Are an Endangered Species’), how can you avoid these problems?... more
Identifying Salespeople Who Can Make A Difference
Here we give you a quick checklist to help identify the salespeople who can create new value for you... more
Connecting With The C-Suite
Are you capable of having a C-Suite conversation? Anybody with the word Chief in their job title; be it with Executive, Financial, Technology, or Information these are the people that lead businesses... more
How To Lever Technology Into Delivering Transformational Customer Experiences
Every company uses technology, why do so few create transformational experiences? To engage in this debate we use a concept call High Tech/High Touch... more
Eleven Rules About Field Based Sales People And Making New Business Appointments
1. The more senior the person you are trying to get a new sales appointment with, the harder it will be for anybody to make that appointment other than a sales person working directly on the phone... more
10 Ways To Freshen Up Tactical Sales Performance
1. Run a short–term incentive around a particular product/service... more
The Sales Interview Technique That Makes a Real Difference
The worst thing you can do is to interview salespeople based on them talking through their CV... more
You Get The Sales Organisation You Deserve – A Guide To The Most Common Failings
Salespeople will behave in ways that align with the way they are recognised and rewarded... more
The Customer Has Postponed The Final Purchasing Decision
What do the following reasons for quarterly targets being missed have in common?... more
The Adding Value Salesperson versus Commodity Selling
Salespeople’s ability to add value to the sales process is in direct proportion to the customer’s perception of how commoditised the product or service is they are buying... more
Rules to Skills to Values – The Journey To Sales Team Empowerment
Rules based sales teams will achieve only so much because of the significant management overhead required in making sure they stick to the rules... more
Recruiting Sales People – What You Should Really Do
Sales organisations are always trying to recruit who they think are the best salespeople... more
7 Technology Related Trends That Are Coming To A Place Near You!
The mobile phone looks like being the first truly successful convergence device since the Teasmaid(?)... more
Its Extrinsic Motivation That Gets All The Attention And Budget,
But Its Intrinsic Motivation That Builds Real Competitive Advantage... more
Prospero Has A Blog
People reading our newsletters often have comments about them, they either agree, disagree, or have questions about the content. Now you can join the debate on the new Prospero Barn Blog... more
Where Have All The Sales Leaders Gone?
Many sales teams aren’t led but managed. Sales Directors, National Sales Managers & Field Sales Managers all need to occupy the leadership space, but many don’t, preferring to stand only on management ground... more
The Modern Sales Professional’s Glossary of Competitive Advantage
These are some of the concepts that are helping the modern sales organisation effectively engage with their most demanding customers and prospects. SalesPathways can help you develop your own capabilities in any of these areas... more
The Challenges Of Dominant Incumbency
When being the biggest isn’t necessarily good news... more
The Minimum Requirements Of Real-Time Sales Management Information
Knowing more than your customers, before your customers, in a joined up way is now a business given. Below are the primary data sets any self respecting sales organisation should have a handle on... more
12 Sales Stories For Christmas
The sales guy who was spotted asleep at the wheel of his car outside a major customer (missing his appointment) with a copy of Covey’s 7 Habits shielding his face from the sun...more
Everybody Can Think, Why Don’t We Do More Of It?
There is thinking concerned with conception (‘day dreaming’) and thinking concerned with action (problem solving)... more
Sales Teams Who Rely On The Manager Getting It Right, All The Time
The tyranny that many sales directors face is one they struggle to articulate until you point it out, and then they have a lightbulb moment and say “absolutely!”. They go further and say if I could solve this problem I would transform the potential of this team... more
The Future Belongs To Those Who See It Coming
One of the things the makes business a fascinating thing to study, it the real-time observable fight for sustainable survival going on at in front of our eyes. What the outcomes will be will only be obvious with hindsight... more
The Benefits Of An Effective Performance Management System
Perfomance Management executed professionally can tranform and organisations ability to drive sales growth… more
Competencies – The Building Blocks of Sales DNA
If the talent of your sales organisation follows the usual distribution curve you will have a few star performers, a few poor performers and the majority there or there about occupying the middle ground. What if you could shift the curve towards the top performers? Think what a difference it would make if a sizable majority; perhaps even half of your sales people were achieving their stretch targets?... more
Selling – The Last Bastion of Amateur Practice?
Over the last 20 years business organisations have transformed themselves. This has been done through the application of a much more disciplined, systemic approach to each functional area. These functions have become professional... more
Football Sales Management
It’s about scoring more goals that the other team – the 'stating the obvious' school of sales management... more
Four Things That Distinguish High Performing, High Growth Organisations From The Rest
Through our ongoing project work we thought it timely to share what we are finding to be four areas of focus that seem to make a material difference to organisational sales performance... more
Ten Strategy Thought Starters
Strategy definition: Creating distinctive, sustainable competitive advantage. Not difficult to articulate but for many organisations difficult to do well... more
Do You Have A Business Growth Engine?
Business Law Number One, every commercial business has to grow its top line revenues over time unless it has found the paradise of declining costs year on year. This is the only way to maintain a profit margin. Therefore, it should follow that every business has a very clear idea how to grow its top line, surprisingly many don’t... more
How Do You Define Value?
The concept of value is an endemic factor of business life. Every organisation is selling ‘value’; every purchaser (whether another business or consumer) is looking to buy ‘value’. So what exactly is value?... more
Business Change Phases - A Three Card Trick
When a business is going through business change it needs a high degree of awareness of the context it finds itself in. Change does not happen in a vacuum, things have led up to the change and things will follow. The trick relates to being aware of your current change phase you are so you can apply the appropriate strategies... more
What’s Happening To Key Account Sales People?
One of the most dynamic areas of the sales process is Key Account Management (we’re using the term generically; there are differing variations like Global Account Management, Enterprise Wide Selling etc, and synonyms like Major Account Management etc). However, whatever the term or nuance, one change driver connects all these different selling approaches; that focusing on a fewer number of customers in ways that delivers greater lifetime value is a very effective business strategy... more
Poor Sales Performance – Don’t Make a Category Mistake
When a salesperson (or anybody for that matter), isn’t performing it’s useful to think about causes not symptoms. There are three root causes as to why somebody isn’t performing... more
Understanding The Motivations of Procurement Departments
Any high value sales team will know all about procurement departments. They intercede themselves between the line management decision makers and the selling organisation... more
How Would You Rate Your Organisation’s Ability To Compete?
All organisations are striving to increase their competitive advantage. Why is it that some seem to have more advantage than others?... more
Business Predictions made in June 2000 for June 2006 by Frankie (mad) Hatter
Sony will be toast in the mobile music market by 2005. The Walkman brand will count for not very much, Mini-disc nowhere and owning their own record label (guaranteeing content) irrelevant...more
A Quick Checklist To Decide Whether Your Business Is At The Top Of Its Business Life Cycle Curve (not all need apply)
The amount off cash the business is throwing off reaches unfeasibly high levels...more
The Four Most Difficult Sales Types to Manage
Managing salespeople is never easy. The top performers who also do things in the approved fashion and the chronic under performers are relatively straightforward to sort out. It’s the awkward squad who are trickier. Below we offer a snapshot of four of the most common types... more
Let’s Hear It For The Old Fashioned Business Getter!
We know that these days cold calling by phone or face-to-face is not going to be very productive, or look very professional. However, winning new business will always be required... more
How Effectively Do Your Salespeople Deliver Value?
The word value is used extensively in the discourse of B2B selling. Often conjoined with the words such as; good, added, proposition, add etc. It’s used so often its real meaning can become lost... more
If You Do One Thing With Your Strategy - Differentiate
There is a critical strategic component that is often completely misunderstood, even ignored all together. The requirement to differentiate through the conscious act of making trade-offs. A winning strategy is by definition different from competitors and what makes it different should be clearly understood by your organisation... more
Possible Differentiation Strategies
How to differentiate is about understanding the main drivers of competitive advantage... more
A Company That is Distinctive
first direct Bank (part of HSBC)
Below are a selection of points that go to show why they are one of the most successful and distinctive banks in the UK... more
An Inside Track To Creating Enormous Wealth (Well, An Idea Or Two!)
Warren Buffett is the one of the world’s wealthiest men, worth circa $40 billion. Reading books about how to replicate his wealth we feel is, at best, a very hopeful premise. However, a couple of his techniques are well worth considering in helping with the strategic development of your business... more
Are You Using The Term Performance Management Correctly?
It’s obvious that sales people need to perform at the required level. It’s surprising how many sales organisations don’t effectively performance manage their sales teams. To do so, the first requirement is to understand what Performance Management is and isn’t... more
Have You Started A Blog Yet? Do You Read A Blog?
These might seem nerdy questions but blogging (blog is a conflation of web log) could be a very big deal indeed. It’s certainly keeping some business awake at night – newspapers fearing their businesses being undermined, major corporations seeing customer blogs giving the ‘real deal’ on their products, or employees telling it like it really is... more
Who Are You? A Quick Self Awareness Check
Somebody who knows what the future capability requirement is and does what is necessary in their role because they want to... more
All Salespeople Are Just Money Motivated? Some Thought Starters
Money is firstly to do with safety and security needs... more
We Are All Selling Solutions Now – But What Are You Really Selling?
Have you noticed how every B2B organisation is now selling solutions? Not just products or services, packages or commodities but lots of solutions... more
Three Business Changing Forces in 2006
"The future has already happened; it just isn't very well distributed" - William Ford Gibson... more
Is Your Organisation Fit or Sexy?
It can be neither but it can't be both... more
The Business Imperative For Being A Demanding, Performance Orientated Organisation (One more time!)
It stimulates a success orientated culture that constantly reinforces itself... more
There are major change forces affecting the way business will be conducted over the coming years. Understanding these forces and working out appropriate responses can give you real market leadership... more
Do your Sales Executives measure up?... more
We Are All Selling Services And Solutions Now
As many market-places commoditise selling organisations attempt to move up their value chain to escape the deathly grip of diminishing competitive advantage... more
Developing Key Accounts
A business that is serious about maximising the business from its existing customer base will need to have a key account specialism. Below we have outlined a list of the criteria that will deliver an effective Key Account Capability... more
Is Communication A Problem To The Answer
Increasingly more and more business people are faced with the challenge of being able to communicate effectively and professionally with their customer base, their colleagues, their managers and their suppliers. The ability to prepare and... more
Ten Indicators Of High Performance Sales Management
Discover the ten key indicators of high performance sales management, and see how your team measure up... more
How Do You Future Proof Your Sales Organisation?
The sales function is dead, long live the sales function. It’s a much more interesting debate to focus not on whether selling is finished (it isn’t), but on how it needs to change. This article focuses on the drivers that will future proof your sales function, keeping it... more
How Are You Coping With Change In Your Sales Value Chain?
We haven’t met a sales organisation that doesn’t use words like solutions, valued added, consultative in its meetings, but when we see salespeople operating out in the field they are working with terms like, deals, discounts, special terms and... more
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