I like this part: When I ask an Exec about their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and they answer “Fortune 500” or “we’re a horizontal play,” I know I’m in trouble. Growing companies will often argue they can sell to anybody. But to scale, you need to know where you’ll find repeatable & profitable success. Defining our ICP isn’t about creating a [...]
Tag Archives: sales
Inside Sales Analytics, Tracking Daily Activity
As a data geek who’s recently switched careers into sales, I can’t help but think about analytics in my new role as a Lead Gen Rep. To me data is crucial in understanding what’s effective and what’s not. So, I decided to be really diligent about keeping track of everything I do on a daily [...]
Asking for time in a business call
When making a business call, whether it’s cold or warm, I’ve learned to always ask for the person’s time before bothering with whatever I have to say. I find it a professional, and a polite thing to do. But it’s a surprising easy question to mess up. Word Choice For one thing, the words you [...]
Email Marketing, without permission
For the last two months, for the first time in my life, I’ve been actively involved in marketing activities of a startup company and one of the main issues I’ve found myself grappling with is email marketing. First, let’s acknowledge that email marketing is really easy: Buy a list of contacts from a vendor Load [...]
On Gaining Your Prospect’s Attention, or the “IBS”
Wendy Wiess has a good post on IBS (Initial Benefit Statement), here is a quote: The point is that you need to get into your customer’s heads and figure out what differentiates you (your company/products/services) from the competition and why your customers buy from you. Then in your cold call opening, lead with that differentiator [...]
Looking for meaningful work
As I start seriously thinking about how to find that one sales job that I can be happy with for many years to come, I’ve come up with several different ways of searching. The most obvious and unfortunately the most popular (I say unfortunately because it’s the least effective) way to look for a job [...]
Cold calling (from the callee’s perspective)
I found a great blog post by Greg Reinacker, CTO of NewsGator who apparently gets cold called a lot at work. Greg took the time to write out in detail what it’s like to be the reciepient of a bad cold call. Here are some good quotes: Imagine this, which seems to happen most of the time: Greg: “Hello, this [...]
What happened to Sales training?
From the Sales and Sales Management Blog, comes a guest post by Jonathan Farrington discussing the consequences of reduced opportunities for sales training, and the importance of ongoing personal training: During the seventies, eighties and nineties, it was common for large corporations such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Compaq etc to put their new sales recruits through [...]
Irrationality of Customers
In a well phrased post, Seth Godin speaks again, here is a quote: You know that your car is more aerodynamic. You know that your insulation is more effective. You know that your insurance has a higher ROI. You’ve thought about it a lot because it’s your job to think about it. It’s your job [...]
Professional networker at his best…
Last week NYT profiled David Topus, who regularly gets on an airplane for the sole purpose of meeting potential clients there. “It doesn’t really much matter where it’s going, he says, as long as the fare is right.” I was surprised that he was able to engage so many people on an airplane without immediately [...]
