Blog: May 2011

Three CRM Reports I Cannot Live Without

sfcg's picture
published by sfcg on May 24, 2011 - 1:37am

When I have the opportunity to work with great people, I end up learning more from them than they do from me.  Having consulted for over 250 different companies in my career, I’ve had the opportunity to witness just about every management style imaginable – some excellent, others not so much.  Each time I work with someone excellent, I try to emulate those characteristics.  It's a hobby of mine to find a common thread amongst all of them.  Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

There is no substitute for organization.

Running a High Performance Sales Meeting

sfcg's picture
published by sfcg on May 5, 2011 - 8:16pm

Is there anything more painful than the weekly team sales meeting?  You know, the one where each sales person reports in turn the activities they’ve completed account-by-account.  I’ve noticed a few things that every one of these meetings have in common.

  1. Boring - They are extremely boring. No one ever looks forward to the weekly sales meeting.
  2. Rambling - Everyone feels like they have to “prove” that they are working so each person in turn takes the maximum amount of time to talk about all the things going on in each account. Often they recycle the same information as last meeting.
  3. Zero Impact - When the meeting is over, no one does anything differently than they did before.
  4. Ironic - As painful as these meetings are, it seems all good sales organizations conduct these meetings.

At SFCG we always consider the cost of sales time to be very dear.  That one hour meeting is 2.5% of a standard work week.  So that weekly sales meeting drops the effective selling time of a 40 person sales team by one full person.  If it runs long (i.e. two hours) the effective selling force drops to 38 people.And yet, it seems like the height of management by abdication not to conduct a weekly review.

Why?