The Principles of Entrepreneurs: How Precise Economic Philosophy Empowers Sales

If you’re a member of a sales force, or in sales management, there is always practical information you must know. You need to know as much as possible about your own products. You need to have a firm grounding about your particular industry and market. Today especially you must have as much insight as possible into your prospect companies, their buying processes and their decision makers.

But what about the overall economic environment in which you operate? Seen or unseen, that environment has principles operating every minute of every day. The very idea of sales is actually rooted in economic theory. And while it may seem that such theory would constitute very dry reading, be a struggle to understand and really not needed or desired to operate in the day-to-day sales environment, the exact opposite is true. These principles are in fact easily grasped—and the vision they provide can go a long way to assisting you in understanding the background of your very existence within the business world.

What is Sunk Cost, and What Do You Need to Know About It?

Sunk costs are costs that your company has already invested in products or services that must now be profitably recovered through your sales efforts. What does this all mean on the level of the sales force?

Sales Force, Sales Management and the Opportunity Cost

Opportunity cost is the investment your company must make to achieve a sale, and it has a bearing on every company activity associated with a sales cycle.

Subjective Value: The Key to Insight Selling

Subjective value means the perceived value of your product or service in the mind of the prospect. In sales, subjective value is everything.

Sales Management: What Comparative Advantage Can Do For You

Comparative advantage has an application within the realm of sales management: optimizing a sales force based on differing strengths of salespeople.

Sustainable Value Means Sales Force Effectiveness

Sustainable value has an intrinsic application to commerce, the sales force, and in fact personal lives and even the activities of nations.

Salespeople as Entrepreneurs: What You Really Mean to the World

As a salesperson, you have most likely given little thought to what your activities might mean to the world at large. Believe it or not your role as a salesperson—as an “entrepreneur within the enterprise”—has a more profound significance than you might think.

Download The Principles of Entrepreneurs: How Precise Economic Philosophy Empowers Sales now.

The Coevera Manifesto

Originally published under the Pipeliner CRM name. Pipeliner is now Coevera — same company, evolved identity.

What is a manifesto, and why have we, the developer of a CRM solution, created one?

A manifesto is defined by the dictionary as “a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives.” This is our public declaration of the intentions behind Coevera, and our objectives and motives for the product and for our company.

Coevera is many things. It is the most visual CRM on the market–we call it Instant Intelligence, Visualized. It is the first CRM that truly empowers salespeople, and has as its goal the freeing of salespeople so that they can truly flourish and succeed.

But why are we really here? Are we here just to develop and sell a CRM application?

No. Behind the development of that CRM application–and, in fact, behind everything we do–we have a real cause.

There are 5 basic parts to our Manifesto.

1. The Driving Force of Globalization and the Digital World

There is a fundamental transformation happening—actually one that’s been happening for a number of years now but which has reached mammoth proportions and only continues. That is the evolution of the digital world.

A primary focus of the digital world is processes. Another very important focus is the harnessing and use of data trends.

But there is another, radical change brought about by the digital world that must be dealt with head-on, as it will overrun anyone who doesn’t. While the whole world has become interconnected, that means that all the information coming from everywhere is literally available to everyone, practically as soon as it is released. What kind of information overload can that lead to? And what is the solution?

There is also a major overload and complexity in sales–and that is where Coevera comes in.

2. Trade is Essential to Growth and Economic Stability

It has been pointed out by several leaders in the Austrian School of Economics over the last 150 years that trade has a peacekeeping element. 2 parties engaged in trade cannot engage in war. If they do, the trade, which is benefiting both sides, ceases. Hence you can see that trade, in addition to many other benefits, greatly assists in keeping peace.

You might notice that today there is a great amount of attention not just on trade, but on fair trade. Fair trade would mean honesty—fairness to people purchasing the product or service, and fairness within the marketplace. But it also includes fair wages to the employees of producers, and benefit to the environment in which products are produced. Using this standard, you can see how vitally important fair trade is in today’s world, in which not only war is a threat, but also environmental ruin and depletion of resources.

How does sales fit into all of this? Simple: Trade is conducted by salespeople. As you might see, salespeople are, in fact, a major force in keeping peace throughout the world.

And Coevera is there to fully empower them the whole way.

3. The Positive Sales R(Evolution)

At Coevera, our main focus has never been to make it more possible to control salespeople (as seemed to be the mission of many CRM applications), but to empower them and, with every release, make it increasingly more possible for them to sell.

Today, the honest salespeople—whom we believe are in the far majority—are winning out. Why? The broad proliferation of the internet has brought transparency to commerce, business…and salespeople.

In an effort to assist the majority of salespeople—the honest ones—in today’s interconnected world, we came up with what we call today’s Network Selling Model. In Network Selling, the elements shared between the seller and the buyer are those things on which they both must firmly agree for the sale to be a total success and, more importantly, for further successes to follow.

Coevera is a major component in supporting Network Selling.

4. Only Sound Education Brings Future Prosperity

To say the least, we are big believers in education—not just about our product, but about sales, leadership and anything else relevant to the world of business in which we can help. Most of our materials are provided free of charge—we really want to help educate and change the business world for the better.

In looking through our educational materials, you’ll see that they are totally geared toward application. If you read or learn something, we believe you should be able to turn around and apply it. Otherwise, why learn it? We believe that this is the future of education in general—it will move away from being so theory-oriented and will be completely structured around applicability.

5. The Coevera Philosophy Wheel

We think it is crucially important to describe our philosophy because our customer, our partner, the user engaging with us, should understand the underlying concepts that drive Coevera. If you understand the underlying concepts, it will empower you to make even better use of the software.

Everything we do is visual–hence we have also created our philosophy wheel to better communicate our foundational philosophy

Downloadable Checklist: Choosing the Right CRM

A convenient, downloadable way to help you keep track of pain points and features that will make your decision easier. Accompanies our ebook, The Everything Guide to Choosing the Right CRM

How Do You Choose the Right CRM Solution for Your Team?

Our downloadable checklist is a great adjunct to our ebook, The Everything Guide to Choosing the Right CRM Solution. With this checklist in hand, you will know what matters most to you and your sales team, so you can make the most informed decision about the kind of system that will work best for your organization.

The checklist is useful in many ways:

Know your pain points, so the solution you choose addresses them.
Understand what features are most important.
Distribute this checklist and find out what your team wants in a CRM.

Download this handy checklist for your team and management and find your decision easier and clearer as you make this important decision.

About The Everything Guide to Choosing the Right CRM Solution

Our Everything Guide to Choosing the Right CRM Solution is designed to help you make a successful changeover to modern CRM. We’ll walk you through all the moving parts, the pitfalls, the pain points, and the methods to help you find the right solution for your organization.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

What to look for in a CRM Solution that will work for your team
The measurable benefits of implementing the right CRM system
How to cope with the challenges that come with change
How to avoid very costly mistakes while choosing a CRM
A resource page of CRM review sites — see what other sales pros have to say about the options you are considering

Visit our award-winning sales blog and find more Sales resources!

Get your free trial of Coevera now.

Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine

Author Jeanne Bliss writes the customer experience roadmap to transform your business and culture.

Chapter 1: The Chief Customer Officer Role Is Clarity

Chief Customer Officer 2.0 gives you a proven framework that has launched and advanced the customer experience transformation in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies around the world.

And it will take years off your learning curve.

Written by Jeanne Bliss, a CCO practitioner for over twenty years, and pre-eminent thought leader on the role of the Customer Leadership Executive and customer experience, this book outlines in detail Jeanne’s Five-Competency Model. The same model Jeanne uses to coach the C-Suite, Chief Customer Officers, and Vice Presidents of Customer Experience globally. Using her framework, you will discover how to:

Manage and Honor Customers as Assets
Align Around Experience
Build a Customer Listening Path
Embed Experience Reliability and Innovation
Lead One Company Accountability, Leadership & Decision Making

Chief Customer Officer 2.0 will quickly get you into action with a united leadership team, shifting your business focus to earning the right to growth, by improving customers’ lives. In Chief Customer Officer 2.0, Jeanne Bliss provides practical guidance on how to embed the Five Competencies into the way your company develops products, goes to market, enables and rewards people, and conducts annual planning. And she fearlessly shares her leadership tools and ‘recipe cards’ developed over thirty-years as a Chief Customer Officer practitioner and coach, to support and enable your business transformation.

Including over forty case studies of how Chief Customer Officers around the world embed these five competencies, this is the book you have been waiting for. The book that tells it like it really is and gives you the framework to begin to build your customer-driven growth engine — today.

If Jeanne Bliss hadn’t written her first book, I wouldn’t be in the role I have today. Now, ten years later, she continues to provide leading guidance for Chief Customer Officers.

Jeb Dasteel
Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, Oracle

It’s really very simple: Anyone in business should be thinking about customers, and anyone thinking about customers should be reading Jeanne Bliss.

Don Peppers
Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

No one knows more about the Customer Experience Leadership Role than Jeanne Bliss. Buy this book to jump-start your learning, get traction and transform your business.

Scott Dille
Senior Vice President and Director of Client and Employee Experience at Northern Trust

Download the first chapter of Jeanne’s book, free!

Studying Sales Techniques

Summaries of the best, most recently published techniques for selling better and smarter.

Become the Best Salesperson You Can Be

Knowing what to study can make you a true entrepreneur within your organization. in this ebook you’ll discover a quick shortcut – a synopsis of five of the most influential sales books we’ve read recently. Each chapter will summarize the key points to get you selling better, faster.

In this ebook, you learn:

The latest thinking about effective sales approaches
How to plug leaks in your sales pipeline
The most effective way of to lead the sales-customer dialog
How to listen actively and build trust with prospects

Accelerate Learning and Master Your Skills

Experimenting with different ideas and learning from trial and error is a solid way to improve. Not only can you hone your skills, but you can also identify and scrap the stuff that doesn’t work.

But the reality is that to get really good, you need to practice — a lot — and that takes time. In fact, some experts argue that to master a skill, you need to accumulate 10,000 hours of practice. Now most of us haven’t got the time to wait that long! So here’s some good news that can shortcut this learning process significantly. It’s simply to learn from the thought leaders in the industry by studying the right books and following three main points:

Accelerate your learning and get an edge
Stay up to date
Develop the right personal skill set

The challenging global economy, changes in consumer buying habits, and the shift toward customer-centric selling have made sales a challenging and exhilarating profession. Download our free ebookand learn more.

In the past, a lot of selling was done via cold-calling. The problem with this tactic is that it has turned sales into a numbers game. But as you’ve probably experienced, this approach misses the point of what a skilled salesperson can achieve.

Get your free trial of Coevera now.

Startups, Sales, & CRM Solutions

With a startup, an entrepreneur or several entrepreneurs are quite literally diving into the unknown. As anyone who has done it will tell you, there is a great deal of “learn as you go” involved, along with unpredicted obstacles, unforeseen expenses, and many other factors.

This ebook acts as a map through these uncharted waters, to help get a startup’s sales organization blasting off.

Chapter 1: Know Your Buyers

A startup is generally brought about by an entrepreneur or entrepreneurs, derived from a bright idea. At some point, however – ideally before the business is founded or a product or service is actually produced – it is vitally important that those directly engaged in running the business learn everything they can about their potential buyers.

Chapter 2: Empower Sales from the Beginning

One of the first decisions in a startup should deal with how your salespeople are to be regarded and empowered. This will determine a critical path for the future of your company – and its level of success.

Chapter 3: 4 Crucial Considerations for CRM Systems

As startups get off the ground, they have numerous choices to make regarding automation. Due to a fledgling company’s financial status, these choices are often mitigated by cost. When it comes to the choice of CRM systems, however, there are four other important factors to take into account in addition to its price.

Chapter 4: Startups and CRM Solutions: A Real-World Analysis

There is a lot of theory on operating a startup (just check the curriculum of your local college or business school). But in the real world, due to the demands of getting a business up and operational, much of the time any theory goes right out the window while entrepreneurs struggle to keep clients happy, keep the bills being paid and seeking out new business. Here is one real-world story.

Chapter 5: Startups and CRM Solutions: Another Real-World Analysis

With a startup, an entrepreneur or several entrepreneurs are quite literally diving into the unknown. As anyone who has done it will tell you, there is a great deal of “learn as you go” involved, along with unpredicted obstacles, unforeseen expenses, and many other factors. The evolution of a sales process early on, along with the correct choice of CRM solution, are two ways you can guard against unforeseen circumstances. Here is another real-world story of how one startup proceeded.

Chapter 6: Pay Careful Attention to Software ROI

Startups come about due to entrepreneurs and their innovative actions. In addition to spotting and seizing an opportunity that others have evidently missed or not taken full advantage of, an entrepreneur will find all kinds of nifty ways of getting a startup off the ground while cutting costs and keeping everything within budget.

In today’s automated world, one of the important startup costs is that of software. But despite the hell-bent effort to get the business up and running, time should be taken to evaluate software ROI (return on investment) as accurately as possible.

Download and read Startups, Sales, & CRM Solutions now.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Explained

Capitalize on the new buyer’s journey by aligning sales and marketing.

Help your business grow!

Discover the advantages of making your sales and marketing work together.

A huge part of the buying decision is made before your customer reaches out to your brand or meets your sales team. What does that mean for your sales department? Learn more about recent changes in the customer’s buying journey and explore the benefits of aligning your sales and marketing departments. Configure your sales process to match this new buying landscape.

In this ebook, you learn:

The powerful benefits of aligning your sales and marketing efforts
How and why the buyer’s journey is changing
How to take control of the front end of your sales pipeline

Download this free ebook and learn how buying decisions are made – and how you can be there at the right time.

The fact is, for each day that your sales and marketing departments are out of alignment, your business is haemorrhaging money. And lots of it… Here’s some proof…

Pipeline Management: Success with CRM

Pipeline management means the difference between accurate, successful sales and hit-or-miss sales that mysteriously make it to the close or don’t. Pipeline management therefore even affects the success or failure of a company, and the attainment of company goals.

This ebook shows you the relationship between pipeline management and sales success, as well as the vital role played by the choice of CRM solution.

Chapter 1: Pipeline Management: The Backbone of Your Enterprise

Much has been written (and spoken of) regarding the need for an accurate sales process – also known as sales pipeline management. Companies generally fall into a rough range of possibilities with regard to pipeline management.

Chapter 2: Pipeline Management: Critical to Attaining Company Goals

What may not be clear until you take a closer look is the fact that accurate and effective pipeline management is essential to the attainment of long-term company goals. For that reason, pipeline management might also be called “opportunity management.”

Chapter 3: Pipeline Management: A Self-Sustaining Success

Laying out the separate steps of the sales process and making sure they are followed is the only way of bringing control to sales, both for the salespeople and sales management. If played right, pipeline management is also a self-sustaining success.

Chapter 4: Pipeline Management: The Vital Importance of Automation

When allocating a budget in an enterprise, automation often takes somewhat of a back seat to other matters. While the causes for this are many and varied, we will not attempt to examine them here, but simply demonstrate the vital importance of IT support for one crucial activity: sales pipeline management.

Chapter 5: CRM and Booming Your Company

Automated tools for CRM have been around in one form or another since the advent of computers. CRM today goes well beyond simple contact management, however, and if intelligently utilized can help steer an enterprise into whole new levels of profitability.

Chapter 6: Where CRM Can Go Wrong

CRM can and often does become almost more of a hindrance than a workable solution. Why does this occur, and what can be done about it?

Download Pipeline Management: Success with CRM now.