Sales Management
B2B companies don't seem to last long these days for two simple reasons: It keeps getting easier, faster, and cheaper to attack incumbents with new offerings -- a consequence of Marc Andreeson's prescient claim that "software is eating the world."The…
The B2B sales development rep, commonly referred to as an SDR, is generally considered to fulfill two functions for a growing company: To create new opportunities, usually in the form of scheduled meetings with the right people in targeted market…
In Part 1 of this blog series, I wrote that “Almost every acquisition fails to achieve its goals as laid out at the time someone decided it was a great idea,” and ended with the questions, “Can this sad story…
In sales, we have long had the notion of a territory, granted as a kind of fiefdom to a salesperson willing to mine it for us. The notion is fundamentally feudal, but still congenial for a certain type of person…
In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, I made the claim that sales headcount is not a growth constraint for most B2B companies. This claim must, of course, be wrong. How do I know I’m wrong? Because the entire…
While there is variety in the business-to-consumer world, it is nothing compared to B2B. The reason is that there are only so many kinds of human consumers (I’ll leave our cats, dogs, pigs, and weasels out of this one!) constrained…
Let's imagine you own a gold mine. For years, you've been walking into a dark hole in the ground, using your headlamp to follow a promising vein of gold-rich quartz, and using your pick and then a shovel to fill…
Part 4 of this series focused on the possibility of industrializing the top of the sales funnel. The question has been raised: “Why just the top of the funnel?” After all, if we don’t close more deals and dollars, have…
In Part 1 of this series, I disposed of the idea that B2B sales has already been industrialized by the widespread adoption of the sales development model. Let’s suspend the question of whether B2B sales can be industrialized and ask,…
I find myself using the phrase “the industrialization of sales” a lot recently — and overconfidently, it turns out. The meaning seemed obvious to me, and I naively thought it must be in common use, until I googled “industrialization of…
