Understanding the Sales Force

For double article Friday, in addition to my Sales Pipeline Nazi article, I have the following bonuses for you:

Today, more than ever before, strategic partnerships, both formal and informal, are an important element of conducting business. They exist at all levels, including these 10:

When most sales bloggers write about selling, we almost always discuss direct B2B sales. Ignored in all of these articles are those clients and companies that sell through channels. The channels are many, and include stocking distributors, brokers, retailers, VARs, agencies, partners, resellers, rep firms and more. The salespeople charged with selling to and through a channel are different – in many ways – and their goals, expectations, activities, skill sets and strategies must be different as well.

Not too long ago, before the advent of social selling, if a salesperson needed to add new opportunities to the pipeline, there were basically two options:

Make cold calls; or
Call existing customers for referrals and introductions.

The Growing Power of Inside Sales appeared on the Harvard Business Review Blog on July 29. Overall, the article was quite good with valid sources and statistics. On the other hand, it was flawed in that, as usual with articles like this, it cited examples from only large companies (Astra Zeneca, IBM and SAP) leading most readers to come to one of two conclusions:

I don’t write about Inside Sales as often as I should. After all, everyone else is writing about it, some bloggers are devoted to it, and if you read what the inside sales bloggers are writing, you would think that inside sales is king. Of course, it is the king of the top of the funnel where everything begins, but with few exceptions, selling rarely ends in that department.

Yesterday I was in the office, preparing for the formal introduction of Objective Management Group’s (OMG) award-winning, new and improved, fourth generation, Sales Candidate Assessment (view the 25-minute Webinar here) when the phone rang and I answered.

The May issue of Top Sales Magazine is now available and in addition to my monthly article, this month’s issue is loaded with important reading on sales and selling.

Earlier this week, I wrote the “Get Your Butt Out of Your Head” article. At that same tournament, I heard an even funnier story from its director. He told us about a team who went 0-7, losing each game by the mercy rule. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, if a team is losing by 12 runs or more after 4 full innings, the game is stopped, showing mercy to the team who was getting slaughtered.