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According to a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled Dismantling the Sales Machine, the time has come to let salespeople utilize their “on the ground” judgment and sales techniques when it comes to making various decisions about opportunity management. According to the article, “Selling today requires flexibility, judgment, and a focus on results—not process.” The ...

The key component of all sales strategies is opportunity management. And the key element of opportunity management is evaluating risk—having as much information as possible to outweigh the possibility of the sale becoming a loss. There are many components that make up a sales cycle, including the strengthening of interest and the evolution of that ...

It used to be that cold calling was the primary method of lead generation itself. It was a do-or-die proposition: those that succeeded at it remained salespeople. Those that didn’t usually found other careers. This was because salespeople were usually “flying blind” not knowing if the person they were calling was even remotely qualified as ...

It used to be that businesses owners—especially in those businesses that were sales-centric—would sweat the holidays. While it was mandatory that they paid their employees, those employees weren’t in the office and leads and sales were not being made. Money was being spent but none was coming in; not really a viable proposition. But today ...

The subject of “what constitutes a lead” is often the subject of heated debate between a sales force and a marketing department. Marketing is generating leads and sending them over to sales reps; the sales reps are firing back comments such as, “You call these leads? These guys were barely interested!” Today astute companies not ...

Lead generation used to be quite different than it is today. A company could do some research about potential clients, create some materials, send them out, and count on a certain percentage of leads coming back. When contacting those leads the sales force could have some confidence that the prospects, for the most part, wouldn’t ...

In today’s digital business environment, your website is the most crucial component of converting marketing efforts to leads—i.e. lead generation. The vast majority of potential prospects interested in your product or service arrive at your website; hence your website must be totally geared toward turning those prospects into leads. Once you have conducted all the ...

In the old days before the internet, lead generation was a different game. It was primarily done proactively by cold calling, or by sending out a mailing and having responders call in. In both cases it was up to a live sales rep to convert the interest to a lead. When the internet began proliferating ...