What's On Our Minds

What exactly are sales and marketing systems? What does that mean? A fully coordinated system tracks every activity from the first contact through the eventual sale and ongoing customer relationship. It\\\\\'s not just a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), but it\\\\\'s a way of developing relationships and turning suspects into customers. It\\\\\'s not the old style hand off from marketing to sales. It\\\\\'s a continuous marketing role from introduction through mature, long-term customer relationships.

I hear people complain far too often, “I can’t get our sales team to use our CRM. They might enter basic contact info, but that’s about it. It’s useless....”

You want to talk about pet peeves? One of the biggest things that bothers me when I look at an organization’s marketing and sales efforts is seeing it creating and wasting leads. It is all too common, and it’s why many people think that marketing is a waste of money. Frankly, many organizations are wasting their money....

That old question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” is almost completely meaningless in business today. Things are moving just too fast. Frankly, planning for more than a year is also getting to be too far ahead to predict. To really keep your sales team fully empowered, you have to narrow that window of marketing development and planning, and increase your communications between the sales and marketing teams....

Everybody has his or her own particular pet peeve. For some it may be that person at the supermarket taking a full cart to the “15 items or less” checkout while you wait in a long line with only twenty items. Or that person talking during a movie....

The popular image of marketing is this: Someone trying to convince you to buy something you don’t want and don’t need. I suppose that’s slightly better than the stereotypical image of all sales people as used car salesmen. But it’s still far from the truth, especially in B2B sales. There’s no point in trying to sell people something they don’t need. The key is finding prospects that do need what you sell....

It is a mystery to me how so many organizations have conflicts between their sales and marketing teams. It just doesn’t make any sense. And in today’s business environment, there’s no excuse why it should be the reason you’re missing your full potential in sales....

It’s hard not to be conflicted about sales. We’ve all had to deal with that stereotypical car salesman or that guy in the blue shirt and name tag that just won’t leave you alone to look at new TVs. And those of us who have to sell our own product and services have to continually ask ourselves, “Should I call that prospect again today?”