Sales Quota 2.0

We are living in an era of constant change. The speed of change is simply astonishing. Though all of us are aware of this and the impact it has on businesses (more significant for the small businesses), not many have changed the way we conduct the business and subsequently, the way we define and set sales targets for our sales force. The most common way to define this is still to decide an annual quota for each sales person (probably an increase by a certain % on his previous years sales figures) and incentivize him/her if they over achieve on […]

Social Media strategies for business

There has been a great hype around social media and how businesses can benefit from them.  As with everything else, one needs to decide the purpose for which the business wants to use social media and how will it measure the impact on business. A few strategies that have worked well are: Social media sites as an additional sales channel: Providing specific deals for a specific period for customers who follow your posts on the social media sites (could be twitter, facebook, linkedIn or any other such sites). Dell has been highly successful in using twitter to get additional sales […]

Measuring sales-force effectiveness

One of the key challenges that I have seen in senior leadership is to measure the sales-force effectiveness. This becomes even more important if we are in an environment where revenue growth is difficult to come-by. So how does one measure the effectiveness of their sales-force. I think there are a few key indicators that show if the sales force is doing a good job or not: Revenue growth: The easiest and the most measured variable is the revenue growth. If the revenue is growing month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year, the sales-force is considered to be doing a good job. This shows […]

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 […]