If you follow my posts on LinkedIn, you may have noticed that I publish the stats of our top-of-the-funnel team — in the common tongue, our Sales Development people. Here’s an example from Wednesday, vernal equinox week, 2017: I have…
The “cold calling is dead” debate can get pretty lively, with surprising insights occasionally emerging from the endless back-and-forth. One such insight, for me anyway, came from reading the responses to a simple question: “Why is cold calling so controversial?”…
March 20, 2017, was like Christmas morning for me. Gordon Tredgold had committed to slide into the ConnectAndSell sales cockpit and hit the accelerator. Gordon, the self-professed “patron saint of hating cold calling,” was going to cold call! I had…
Like everything else since the advent of social media — and maybe since the invention of broadcast media — the question of how to structure and run a sales organization has become both a practical and a religious debate simultaneously.…
In reviewing my Life at 1,000 Dials a Day series, I was struck by just how negative it was, and amazed that anyone would hang in there while we explored questions like “Will 1,000 dials a day chew up my…
When I sat down to write Part 12 of my blog series “Life at 1,000 Dials a Day,” I thought it was going to be easy: just do a little math that includes the price of sales labor — a…
Ah — finally — my favorite topic: how much is that doggie in the window, anyway? Now that we have explored the mysteries, both wonderful and frightening, of Life at 1,000 Dials a Day, how much does it cost to…
When I do the “1,000 Dials a Day” math with someone as part of exploring whether such a speed-up might make sense for their team, I usually bring up a simple fact: if you don’t raise the bar, you are…
I generally try to avoid subtle questions with the kind of “it depends” answers consultants are so fond of. But then I went ahead and asked one in this blog series’ introductory article, “Going Fast: Adapting to Life at 1,000…
The top of the funnel, or TOFU — that magic interface between a company and untapped opportunities — is the growth constraint on every business. It’s kind of like the running game for an NFL team: if it’s weak, you…