In order to more effectively deliver premium online content tailored specifically to your career advancement, BusinessWatch Network has decreased the number of articles in each newsletter - and increased the number of newsletters each month (from 1 to 2 Issues). This new format affords you better access to more selective business-critical information in your career specialty. We hope you enjoy the improved format. Thank you for your continued readership!
Is John "Grizz" Deal the greatest salesperson around? "You can tell a lot about what you're up against in a sales pitch by the way they serve you coffee,"
John Deal mumbles to me, as the others in the room noisily take their seats around the conference table at a well-known British engineering and defense contracting company on a dreary day in central England. I take this to mean that Deal has his work cut out for him, given that his prospects have unceremoniously plunked
down in front of him a jug of scalding coffee and a stack of plastic cups, with no cream or sugar in sight. Deal begins making his case to six poker-faced executives, who proceed to blast him with an array of questions that cast doubt on his product, his business plan, his prospects for survival, and possibly his sanity. Every
sentence seems to start with, "What I don't get is," or "The sticking point with me is," or "But how can you possibly...?" Forty-five minutes later, however, the managers have changed their tune. Now they are asking...
Read the articleBack to top
Great salespeople are masters of psychology: The best of them can suss out pain points and imminent objections just a few minutes into a call. "You can tell a lot about what you're up against in a sales pitch by the way they serve you coffee,"
Their own psyches, however, are more mysterious. Are they motivated by greed and competition? Or masochism and the prospect of rejection? Perhaps both, suggests G. Clotaire Rapaille, a psychoanalyst and ethnographer who has been working with major corporations for two decades. The founder of Archetype
Discoveries Worldwide in Palm Beach, Florida, Rapaille has built a career helping corporations discover the mental models that animate their customers, employees, and organizations. Much of that research has focused on salespeople, whom Rapaille characterizes with a surprising archetype: happy losers.
Understanding what that means, he told editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan, can go a long way toward helping managers get the most out of their often inscrutable sales forces...
Read the articleBack to top
Tips on Managing a Virtual Workforce Telecommuting offers big rewards but takes a different management style. Here are a few great tips from CEOs already "working it out".
These days, it is entirely possible to run a thriving business out of a dozen different cities - with no central office.
We talked to many smart CEOs who have ditched formal digs in favor of online communications between employees, periodic productivity check-ins, and a lot more flexibility. They shared lessons they've learned along the way, and pointers on how to make a virtual company grow and thrive...
Read the articleBack to top
Selling in Your Sleep Bringing your sales into the social media network with proper training and focus
Rule #1: It has to be about them.
Rule #2: It has to be about them.
Rule #3: Never break rules 1 and 2.
Are you a sales professional?
Are you a sales manager?
Check the appropriate box. What you are about to read can, and will, change your view of your world of sales and management. This means more money into or out of your pocket. On a recent Monday, late in the evening, I sent a article I'd written to all of my LinkedIn groups. The content consisted of some research I had
done on productivity in the marketplace that was relevant for every business professional in the world. Then I went to bed. Before my pillow had flattened-in the blink of an eye I was connected with more than 50,000 people! With the click of a button...
Read the articleBack to top
For those of us in the sales profession, it can be argued we are on the front lines of capitalism-the leading edge of demand creation.
Salespeople who are paid wholly or partially on commission are daily living in a real world supply-and-demand marketplace where their financial worth is determined by the value of their productivity. I have been thinking about our roles in a capitalistic society often these days, because the very worth and value of capitalism
itself, shockingly, is being argued daily in this country and abroad since the banking crisis hit. If we draw the right conclusions about who we as salespeople really are and what motivates us within this tough, capitalist system, we can best thrive in the current continued economic doldrums. Thinking about
motivated salespeople also gets me thinking about...
Read the articleBack to top
In today's decentralized, tweeting, demand-printed, www universe, achieving compelling visual coherence is tough.
There's an ever-widening range of communications that need to consistently express your brand (and an e-newsletter has requirements and opportunities that are different from a brochure's or a microsite's); people far outside any marketing department have the tools to make communications (and do); and even if an
organization masters its own staff, others are creating communications outside your walls, 24/7, that affect your brand. In the 1930s, corporate identity's US "inventors"-Egbert Jacobson for Container Corporation of America, Henry Dreyfuss for the 20th Century Limited/New York Central-identified and realized an opportunity
that is still important to us. They understood that the more communications reinforced one another visually, the easier and faster constituents would come to know and recognize a corporation or program. And if what was given coherence was also visually compelling, that coherence translated into increased interest,
participation, loyalty, and value. Mid-century practitioners-think Chermayeff & Geismar for Mobil or Paul Rand for UPS-brought increased discipline: Guidelines (rules, really) ensured that every Mobil sign, pump, and can of oil came together to dominate the vehicular landscape. But those ace communicators and their
clients had it easier than we do now. [Today, crafting or renovating a system for visual brand expression is more like making...]
Read the articleBack to top
If charging the highest price isn't the best strategy, then what is?
Most companies charge what the market will bear. In other words, they charge as high a price as they can. But that isn't the best strategy in two respects. First, it neglects other potential means of profiting from delivering superior value--means that could result in greater overall profit. And second, it weakens...
Read the articleBack to top
5 laws of video marketing A major marketing tool, video campaigns need to be done right in order to compete.
Marketers who are still a little unsure about charting their path through the choppy waters of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn could do worse than check out this handy little guide to making social media work for them.
The CMO's guide to the social landscape, created for CMO.com by client 97th Floor, takes all the major social media sites in the U.S. and analyzes their capabilities in four sectors:...
Read the articleBack to top
Yes, you can manage what you can't measure, asserts Charles Green. Sometimes measurement even has a downside.
Business has caught a terrible case of the measurement flu. Companies seem more focused on performance indicators than on the actual health of what they are trying to measure. Beyond this confusion of measurement, there are side effects: depersonalization, a decrease in trust, and a false sense that costs and risks
are actually being managed. All three are evident in business in the last decade, and not just on Wall Street. Imagine you're at lunch with a very good customer. You tell him or her:...
Read the articleBack to top
At College Admission Time, Lessons in Thin Envelopes.
Few events arouse more teenage angst than the springtime arrival of college rejection letters. With next fall's college freshman class expected to approach a record 2.9 million students, hundreds of thousands of applicants will soon be receiving the dreaded letters. Teenagers who face rejection will be joining good company,
including Nobel laureates, billionaire philanthropists, university presidents, constitutional scholars, best-selling authors and other leaders of business, media and the arts who once received college or graduate-school rejection letters of their own. Both Warren Buffett and "Today" show host Meredith Vieira say that while
being rejected by the school of their dreams was devastating, it launched them on a path to...
Read the articleBack to top
Forward to a Friend:
Do you have a friend that would like to receive Sales&MktgWatchsm?
Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would
benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits
of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who
may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did!
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from Sales&MktgWatchsm
simply change your status,
or send a letter requesting opt-off to:
The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945
DISCLAIMER: Sales&MktgWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS.
All other trademarks or service marks contained in this email are the property of their respective owners.
At the time of publication, all links in this e-mail functioned properly. However, since many links point
to sites other than businesswatchnetwork.com, some links may become invalid as time passes.
DMS Inc. supports the DMA Privacy Promise and
Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice. We are committed to the proper use of
email and to protecting consumers from fraudulent or inappropriate
offers. Privacy Policy
DMS Inc. supports the DMA Privacy Promise and
Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice. We are committed to the proper use of
email and to protecting consumers from fraudulent or inappropriate
offers. 