Category: Innovation

Business Model, Innovation

Crowd Funding Platforms and Banks

There has been a consistent growth in the number of Crowd-funding platforms all around the world. This is quite understandable given that they address a niche segment of the market that no other financial system has been able to address well. Some of these crowd funding platforms are now moving from crowd-funding (in lieu of kind & merchandise) to becoming crowd investing platform (in lieu of equity). What surprises me is the fact that banking institutions have not led the way and adopted this model so far but look at these as competition or threat. If I were leading a digital channel for a […]

Innovation, Leadership, Sales

Sales Forecasting

Every sales organization has a sales forecasting process in place. This is usually done in a meeting or on a tele-conference.During this call each sales team talk about how much sales closure do they each expect for the week, month or quarter. This is also the meeting where senior sales managers (2 or 3 levels above the sales executives on the road) want to know the status of the pipeline and determine if they will be able to achieve their sales quota for the respective period, as they are measured on delivering their sales quotas. Typically, everyone in the sales […]

Innovation, Leadership

Innovation or Acquisition

As leaders of an organization, one is always confronted with the need to constantly find avenues of growth to keep their share holders happy. If you are leading one such organization, you are also constantly grappling with the question about where could the next level of growth come from. Do you have innovative products or services in your portfolio which can lead you to the next level of growth? If you are like most of your counter-parts, you usually find out that your innovation pipeline doesn’t look very lucrative when it comes to high growth products or services. Then you […]

Innovation, Podcast, Sales

PBTO24: What’s the Measure of a Sales Managers Success

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Email | RSS

http://traffic.libsyn.com/pushingbeyondtheobvious/24_PBTO24__The_Measure_of_a_Sales_Managers_Success.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Email | RSSOne of the most important pillar of building a high performing sales team, is the performance of your sales managers. So, how do you evaluate the performance of a sales manager? If your organization is like most of the sales organizations, the answer is very simple – Does he hit his sales quota? Sales organizations function like a clear top-down organization. The sales VP or CSO or whatever he is called gets a quota (based on the CEO’s commitment to the stock market or to the board members and investors), say […]

Ideas, Innovation

Everyone wants to innovate but no one wants to fail

Every organization, small or large is talking about innovation to be developed as a key strength within their organization. Every organization has an innovation program running at some maturity, but nothing really breakthrough comes out of these innovation programs. So, what’s wrong? Every organization wants to innovate, but no organization wants to fail People do not remember (everyone knows but conveniently forgets) that not all innovation projects will succeed and there is very little that you can do to forecast which one’s will in fact succeed. In that sense, i think innovation projects are like the Movie business and there is a […]