One of my favorite movies is “Being There” starring Peter Sellers. If you haven’t seen it, I highly suggest that you rent it, as the movie and cast won numerous awards for their performance and wonderful story. I’ll paraphrase the story by saying that a simple-minded gardener (Chance Gardner) is thrust in to the outside…
Ah the proverbial sales funnel. All of us in sales have lived by it and some of us have died by it in our careers. What is it? Has it changed? Who changed it? The sales funnel is a metric driven tool used to measure sales conversion ratios. That is to say the percentage that…
* Marketing & Selling is harder than ever before, you need the right domain expertise to succeed * Runways are shorter, you need to achieve customer & revenue traction faster than ever before * More competition than ever before, it’s vital to get your messaging, value prop & differentiation right * Would you skimp on…
Every three months or so I receive a call from the same sales rep. He immediately launches in to a sales pitch without any regard to what my needs are, in this case I don’t need what he sells. Yet he hasn’t bothered to ask me any questions that would properly qualify me as a…
Good article on the advantages of outsourcing but doesn’t address the advantages of engaging specific domain expertise that you need to go to market from a sales and marketing perspective. The value proposition is accelerated ramp-up, faster time to revenue and higher conversion/success rates . The number one reason start-ups fail is because of poor…
Good article on outsourcing. While I agree with the assertion that most VCs won’t consider investing in a start-up that doesn’t have an outsourcing plan, it seems that most people only consider outsourcing for development. There is a new wave of outsourcing available in the area of go to market sales and marketing services. Most…
Good article but they didn’t include go to market sales and marketing outsourced services that are available.http://www.nytimes.com/allbusiness/AB5221523_primary.html
Have you ever heard start-ups or entrepreneurs claim that they can’t afford to pay for marketing and sales? They’ll “make it up to you” on the back end with a high commission payout. Yet these same entrepreneurs will invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in their time and money in building a product and then…
Remember the days when the dreaded executive admin (aka-gatekeeper) would screen all incoming calls to their executives. As a salesperson, you were convinced that they all looked like battle axes, always woke up on the wrong side of the bed and never had even the semblance of a sense of humor. Then the emotionless screening…
Where do you find wisdom? Through a Google search? In a book? I conducted a Google search for wisdom because that is where most people these days try to find things. The top results listed wikipedia and several on-line dictionaries with the definition for the word wisdom. I happen to like wikipedia’s definition of wisdom…