Posts Tagged ‘Sales Intelligence’
Dreamforce Day 2 – A Keynote Recap
My biggest takehome from yesterday’s Dreamforce Keynote by Mark Benioff wasn’t the power of the Cloud, Mark’s personality, or the evolution of the salesforce.com platform (though it’s interesting to follow the continued expansion away from purely sales-oriented “stuff” to a broader host of applications). It was the realization that the move to cloud computing as…
Read MoreThe Prospect’s Process is in Charge – A Sales Pop Quiz
If you’re not on a call with a prospect or client RIGHT NOW, put down the phone, and stop what you’re doing. And get off Facebook and quit fiddling with your iPhone too. Pop Quiz, hotshot. Here’s the rules: Without looking at your CRM system, think of your highest-probability deal in the pipeline right now,…
Read MoreAnalytics, CRM, and “Sales Prevention”
Ran into a great blog by Bob Apollo (@bobapollo on Twitter) on the Inflexion-Point Blog this morning that really got my wheels turning, entitled “Is your CRM system a sales prevention system?” Since one of my company’s biggest products is a lead management CRM, I was intrigued by Bob’s five “danger signs” that a company’s…
Read MoreSales Analytics — For Cost Per Lead, it’s Not the Number, it’s the Spread
Had an interesting discussion yesterday about some common sales intelligence metrics and analytics, thought I’d share a short tidbit with you. Someone asked whether it’s more important to focus on the Cost Per Lead (CPL) versus the Cost Per Opportunity (CPO). CPL is the cost in direct marketing spend to generate an inquiry, no matter…
Read MoreTop 5 Reasons For Failed Sales Technology Implementations
It’s pretty simple: In three and a half years doing client services in the sales software space, here’s the Top Five Things I’ve found that will kill even the most promising sales automation purchase.
1. The true value of the system is never made apparent.
Forcing people to use new software or systems is certainly a management right, but an effective sales tool must appeal to the reps by solving immediate pains, and by making it easier for them to stay organized and keep promises to their customers and co-workers.
It has to provide better sales intelligence (data), improve speed and efficiency (automation), or heighten overall employee impact (training and process development), or employees simply tune out . . . .
Read MoreTechnology Isn’t a Sales Strategy
If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ve probably heard me bring up a company by the name of High-Yield Methods (https://www.h-ym.com) and its founder, Dick Lee.
Dick’s been a top-level business consultant for three decades now, but he’s also an insightful blogger on CustomerThink.com, a voracious researcher, and possessor of a wicked sense of humor.
In his “Another Inconvenient Truth About Lead Management” whitepaper, Dick bemoans that far too many CRM software vendors tell their prospects that CRM will magically take care of their bad lead management and sales processes. His precise words were, I believe, “Yeah right. And Santa Claus still comes down our chimney every year . . . .”
Read MoreBad Sales Intelligence is Bad; Bad Metadata is Worse
A lot of companies struggle with bad data. They don’t have enough of it, or if they do it’s out of date, not well-organized or both. As Trish Bertuzzi with The Bridge Group stated last week in an excellent blog post,
“Bad data is probably handicapping your team by at least 25%.”
“Your email campaigns are bouncing, your LeadGen & Sales Reps are spending time looking for the right guy and all this is adding up to a lot of non-selling time.”
But even if you’re actively managing the data, do you have the right metadata analysis to make it useful?
In simple terms, metadata is “data about data” . . . .
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