Outsourced Sales Management

Selling products is hard. Selling change is harder – but if you want a company to thrive long-term, that’s often what’s needed. I was reminded of this while consulting for a company that was undergoing a restructuring. It was long overdue, but also essential if they were going to stay in business. Their organizational structure […]

In the last while, I’ve written about how customers can help sales reps to stop being their own worst enemy; how entrepreneurs who are afraid to sell can get over that hurdle; and now I’d like to have a little chat with the person at the center of these conversations: sales people, I’m talking to […]

Top management and the marketing department don’t always work in sync with the sales reps to help them meet quotas. But if the company as a whole is going to do well, sales needs all the help it can get! We explored how firms can help their sales people in Part 1 by focusing on […]

There’s always one surefire solution: set the sales quota realistically, without top management pushing around the sales manager and burning out local sales reps –  another conversation entirely!  Assuming your company is sticking with their quotas, how we can get sales professionals to beat this sticky lower-than-desired success rate? Sales training can help. A recent […]

A big part of my work as a sales and marketing integration consultant is helping firms to implement and get the most out of Customer Relationship Management software and Sales Force Automation. The first part of the job? Helping the client understand that they’re not the same thing. It’s easy to make that mistake when […]

I’d been working with a client as their outsourced sales management consultant for a while and we’d already achieved a 23 percent conversion rate for our inbound web leads. While nothing to sneeze at, my contracts usually involve an at risk portion for payment. I had no choice but to take on the biggest stumbling […]

Cold calling isn’t the go-to item in the sales professional’s toolbox today. That’s not good or bad – it just is. At a time when everyone seems to have (at least) one phone on hand at any given moment, it’s harder and harder to reach out to a stranger over the phone for that first […]

Kelly was one of those individuals most people think has the character of a born salesperson: a winning Hollywood-quality smile; an easygoing manner that never failed to put customers at ease; always a funny anecdote in his back pocket in meetings over lunch; a superb combination of intuition, persuasiveness and product knowledge. He seemed to […]

I started doing outsourced sales management consulting and related work here in Vancouver a while back, but I still like to keep up to date with news from back in South Africa (My accent? That’s it). One headline of business news stuck out for me: “Consultants to be vetted in future” (my italics added – […]

Sales targets don’t make good sales people. Sales people make good quotas – and they do it through a constant flurry of activity that’s developed, adapted and refined over time. A methodological approach can go a long way – at least until your sales manager makes one of the most common mistakes in business: raising the […]