"Your sales numbers are down - you need to make more calls!" Ever heard that one before. That is the mantra from a manager that does not know what to do to fix a problem. Back in the old days (like 15 years ago) this was the way you sold. You sold this way not because it was efficient, but because there were not many options. I know from experience. I even remember at one of my jobs as a headhunter, my manager would make me every Monday cut employment ads out of the newspaper, paste them on a larger piece of paper, and turn them in as the new leads I was going to hunt that week. From there I had to cold call them on the phone, and at a minimum visit 50% of the companies in person, unannounced. Furthermore, I had to produce a business card showing that I went and did not go to the golf course or the bar with my buddies. Guess what my results were? Let me just say that if you throw enough crap on the wall something will stick but by no means was this scalable or efficient - it was done out of necessity. Unfortunately, there are a lot of managers out there, some who have done sales before, and some who have been on sales calls and had sales meetings so they think they have done sales. Unfortunately many of them have not had an "in the trench" job like this for any period of time. I call them Glenn Gary managers. Have no idea what I am talking about? Go watch the movie Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. It's a classic.... A classically wrong way to sell or to tell people how to sell - at least in this day an age. Wake up dinosaurs - or get out of the way.
I realize this post is just a rant and not a solution, but I needed to rant today.
Optimizing your Customer Acquisition Funnel
And yet another winning blog post by David Skok. This one is about optimizing your customer acquisition funnel:
Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with the goal of converting prospective customers into paying customers. The process is often thought of as a funnel (see diagram above) where you pour in suspects at the top, and various steps in the process, some percentage of prospects successfully convert to the next stage, making the funnel narrower as the process evolves.
No matter how large or successful your business is, you will have at least one place that is a blockage point in your customer acquisition funnel. This is the point where the conversion rates from one stage to the next are not satisfactory, or the point where you have a scaling problem, (i.e. you cannot profitably increase the number of people coming out of that part of the funnel because you have maxed out the capability of one marketing or sales technique). If you solve that blockage point, usually it will cause another to appear somewhere else in the funnel. Read the rest here:
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-funnel/
Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with the goal of converting prospective customers into paying customers. The process is often thought of as a funnel (see diagram above) where you pour in suspects at the top, and various steps in the process, some percentage of prospects successfully convert to the next stage, making the funnel narrower as the process evolves.
No matter how large or successful your business is, you will have at least one place that is a blockage point in your customer acquisition funnel. This is the point where the conversion rates from one stage to the next are not satisfactory, or the point where you have a scaling problem, (i.e. you cannot profitably increase the number of people coming out of that part of the funnel because you have maxed out the capability of one marketing or sales technique). If you solve that blockage point, usually it will cause another to appear somewhere else in the funnel. Read the rest here:
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-funnel/
Manage Customer Success to Reduce Churn
One of the people I follow, David Skok, recently posted an extremely thorough overview of Customer Success Management and customer churn. I wanted to share that here:
The health of a SaaS business is directly tied to its ability to retain its customers and prevent churn. To do this, they have to ensure that their customers are happy. That means making sure they get the promised business benefits they signed up for. This blog post discusses how to measure customer happiness, and how to actively manage your business to achieve it. It also looks at the newly emerging Customer Success function.
Read the rest here:
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/customer-success/
The health of a SaaS business is directly tied to its ability to retain its customers and prevent churn. To do this, they have to ensure that their customers are happy. That means making sure they get the promised business benefits they signed up for. This blog post discusses how to measure customer happiness, and how to actively manage your business to achieve it. It also looks at the newly emerging Customer Success function.
Read the rest here:
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/customer-success/
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