Peak Sales Recruiting

The age old rivalry between marketing and sales is never more contested than in the context of leads. We have all seen it. Marketing complains that sales can’t convert quality leads and sales complains that marketing provides poor quality leads.    In an ever more internet-connected world, companies feel compelled to spend an increasing amount [...]

Many companies can’t resist the temptation to hire a group of inexpensive junior resources to pound the phones and generate more sales at a lower cost of sales, but the results are too often disappointing for a variety of reasons – lack of support from marketing, required tools and processes don’t exist, or the sales [...]

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have exploded in the last couple of years accumulating masses of users and traffic. What does this mean for your sales strategy? As we previously written about Sales 2.0 and building social networks into your sales strategy there has to be a certain level of maturity and [...]

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have exploded in the last couple of years accumulating masses of users and traffic. What does this mean for your sales strategy? We are interested in knowing. Vote in this poll and tell your fellow business-minded friends to vote, too: <br /> <a href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2086025/” mce_href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2086025/”>Are you using [...]

One of our colleagues manages an enterprise sales team and shared some great insight on the “CRM Dashboard trap.” CRM’s are powerful – the dashboards can be updated with a mouse click, downloaded or browsed by our blackberrys and PDA’s and show us what is going on across the team at any moment. The running [...]

Geoffrey James at BNET continues his series of top ten lies in sales. This week, he posted the Top Ten Lies Customers Tell Sales: LIE #10: “We don’t have the budget.” LIE #9: “I promise to read your brochure.” LIE #8: “I am the sole decision-maker.” LIE #7: “Your competition is much cheaper.” LIE #6: [...]

Neil Rackham (author Spin Selling) on Selling Power TV discusses how Sales and Marketing are typically not working well together and how to get it back together (spoiler alert–>) he blames the definition of a lead as one of the root causes of misalignment. Also some other good suggestions like an integrated lead funnel. Always [...]

Wikipedia (of all places) has some interesting stats on CRM market share… @ end of 2007 in terms of Revenue – SAP (25% market share) is first followed by Oracle (15.3%) and Salesforce.com (8.3%), but in terms of growth Microsoft (88%) is leading followed by Salesforce.com (49%). Hard to see Salesforce slowing down with its [...]

Last week I attended the executive briefing from Miller Heiman which just released its Sales Best Practices Study for 2009. We covered the 2008 Sales Best Practices Study here. This year 3,900+ sales professionals participated in the research. Some highlights from 2009: “Successful sales organizations do not do one or two things well; they maintain [...]

Just posted a link to Phone Works Q4 market survey on inside sales performance and stats in our Tech Sales Hiring blog (See Inside Sales Compensation @ Tech Sales Hiring). Some good insights on sales team structure, compensation and performance.