Sales Compensations

An effective sales team is always highly motivated. Most important way of motivating your sales team is through their compensation plan. This is also one of the most important aspects of the sales strategy that can have a big impact on the morale of your sales team and also to the sales they clock-in.  We need to consider different aspects before deciding on the compensation plans. Competitive landscape and the compensation offered by competitors Position of your product on the product lifecycle on the Profitability of your product Sales cycle time for your product Complexity of the sale involved Is […]

Double digit revenue growth

With the global economy showing signs of recovery, most of the organizations are looking at revenue growth. Most of the large organizations (like SAP, Uniliver,etc) are looking at achieving double digit revenue growth for 2010. The questions to ask are :-  Should these large organizations  be happy with a double digit revenue growth (read 10-12%) ? Is this the best that they can do ? If yes, why is that so ? Is their size restricting them from doubling their sales every 2-3 years or are there other reasons ? Is is possible for these large organizations to achieve 25-30% year-on-year growth in their revenues […]

Follow-ups

One of the most important activities in the sales process is the follow-up process post your discussions with them. This critical steps can at times help you move towards a closure or take you away from the deal. Critical questions that one need to address in this process are :- Share new information: Is there any new information (read new offers, whitepapers, references, etc) from the time you had the last discussion. If so, it provides us a good opportunity to contact the prospect and check with them on the current status Timing: How often do you want to follow-up […]

Lead Generation

One of the most common ways to generate leads for B2B scenarios is Email campaigns. Are these effective ? I have done email campaigns as well and my experience with them has been mixed. There were a few campaigns that generated a lot of responses and some which were real duds without even a single response. This made me analyze both the campaigns to understand the difference and the cause for such in-consistent results. The crux of the analysis is as below: Successful campaigns were those that were targeted at my current/past customers for new products or services. These usually […]

Selling via packaging

The importance of right packaging and branding can never be under-estimated. A product/service when packaged (including the branding) well, can be a big differentiator by itself. One can create an instant connect with prospective customers with the branding and packaging. One such example is being illustrated by Seth Godin in his blog “Telling a story on the label“