September, 2006

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Promise a Lot and Deliver Even More

The Brooks Group

This past week Andy and I attended a conference entitled " The Future of Web Apps " in San Francisco. We attended this conference to help us improve our follow-up and reinforcement programs and get some new ideas to bring you more and better information. We accomplished our goal but I also realized that there is selling in everything. The CEO of Techcrunch, Michael Arrington, was speaking about what companies are doing wrong.

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Do not Deprive Yourself of Valuable Insight

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

Companies usually describe their sales process, if they even have one, by a sequence of sales stages describing key activities that are to be carried out by the sales person in the respective phase. I am not going to repeat my opinion on the pitfalls such a concept - focusing on the activities from the sales person’s perspective- can have in understanding where opportunities really are in the sales cycle.

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Maybe an Example Would Help

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

Yesterday’s entry was probably a bit to dry and theoretical for some of you. Maybe you were also among those who found a flaw in the formula or were missing the definitions of the different variables. To take care of the latter two observations, I have republished a revised version of the illustration for yesterday’s entry. For those that understand methods easier from looking at an example, here it is.

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Tell me where the opportunity is

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

In yesterday’s entry, I mentioned that assigning win probabilities coupled with a sales process is counterintuitive at the individual salesperson’s level of responsibility. You can look at it as a very abstract, somewhat awkward way for the sales person to declare where the deal is. Today, I will show you an alternative way on how to declare where an opportunity is.

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How to Improve Email Deliverability and Optimize Each Send

Learn how to optimize email deliverability and drive greater email ROI. What lands your email in the customer’s inbox? Understanding those factors, otherwise known as email deliverability, is critical to getting the most return on your campaign investments. But the “rules” around which factors land you in the spam folder aren’t always easy to keep up with.

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Do Not Stumble Over Your Weighted Forecast

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

A frequently used method to factoring into the forecast the fact that not all deals a sales organization works on are going to be won, is to assign a win probability to each opportunity in your list. If you then sum up all the expected order values multiplied by the respective win probability of all the opportunities in your list, you arrive at a weighted forecast.

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Whither Forensic Forecasting?

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

You might agree with me, that sales people cannot be left alone when it comes to forecasting. There needs to be management adjustment. However as a sales executive be warned. Not all adjustments you make are reducing or eliminating bias and thus reduce forecasting errors. There is an easy test to determine whether you as an executive add value to the forecasting process.

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A Pessimistic Sales Forecast is not an Oxymoron

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

So far we have only discussed potential root causes for inflated forecasts. Despite their ingrained optimism, sales people under certain circumstances produce deflated forecasts, meaning they turn out to be lower than actual sales. If you were to plot a time series of actual versus forecasted sales, chances are that you discover that under forecasting (producing a deflated forecast) is a seasonal effect.

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These Questions Had to Come Up

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

We are living in era of benchmarking and best practices. It is thus no surprise to me that after having given you an example how to derive a rudimentary forecast from the leaking sales funnel, questions like the following have arisen. You might ask yourself how many stages a sales funnel should have? In the picture of the entry prior to giving the example, I used six stages.

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Rudimentary Forecast from Leaking Sales Funnel

The Ultimate Sales Executive Resource

If your Sales people work with lists of opportunities, they usually have captured the date when they expect the opportunity to close (Close Date), the expected order amount and a high level description of the solution the customer considers buying. This is essential information they need to be capable to answer the essential questions of any sales forecast: When do I expect a customer to buy what for how much.

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ABM Success Recipe: Mastering the Crawl, Walk, Run Approach

Shifting to an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy can be both exciting and challenging. Well-implemented ABM motions build engagement with high-value accounts and drive impactful campaigns that resonate with your audience. But where do you begin, and how do you progress from crawling to running? Watch now as Demand Gen experts delve into the essentials of each stage of the ABM process.