Everything Matters
The goal of every marketing and sales organization is to consistently articulate unique, compelling and credible messages to their customers throughout the sales process. Market Strategy
While companies use both “air cover” such as advertising and “ground cover” such as field-based salespeople to deliver their messages, studies have shown that up to 85% of a company’s brand image and the purchase decisions of their customers are determined by the direct interaction between salespeople and target buyers
Unfortunately, none of the stakeholders are happy with the interactions:
• Target customers—of executives that take regular meetings with sales reps, more than 80% say the reps are unprepared, at least 70% simply “talk product” and know little about their business
• Marketing and sales management—less than 25% of CMOs and senior sales executives are satisfied that their sales teams can accurately and consistently communicate targeted messages to their customers
• Salespeople—salespeople spend up to 40% of their time creating presentations, customizing messaging and getting ready to interact with customers ; they use only 20%-50% of the materials created for them by marketing ; and only 10%-20% of salespeople are creating the “best” message for their prospects.
The job of front-line salespeople is not getting any easier. A recent study by IDC found that sales cycles have increased 24% and the number of decision makers involved has increased to seven.
Salespeople and marketing and sales management need a tool that:
• Connects salespeople with the best content, peer insight and subject matter experts (“sales assets”) for each specific selling situation
• Enables salespeople to intuitively access the best sales assets on-demand
• Promotes the most appropriate content to the salespeople and allows them to personalize it while reinforcing the brand
• Enables marketers to develop messaging and sales assets that salespeople actually use by ensuring they are aligned with the way salespeople really sell
• Allows subject matter experts to publish and promote their knowledge, content and insight without duplicating their efforts with every salesperson
• Allows marketing and sales management to see how the sales assets are actually used and get feedback on the quality, relevance and effectiveness of them from the sales team Sales Tool
In essence, marketing and sales teams need to harness the collective genius of their organizations and make it easily accessible to every frontline sales resource.
The field of “sales enablement” has emerged to fill this gap in marketing and sales, and a Chicago-based firm, SAVO Group, has distinguished itself with its award-winning on-demand application.
Frank Lynn & Associates has partnered with SAVO Group to extend the application to organizations whose sales coverage models include indirect sales channels such as consultants, system integrators, VARs, manufacturer’s representatives, dealers and distributors.
Organizations that leverage indirect sales channels in complex, consultative sales situations benefit greatly from the use of sales enablement tools. FL&A and SAVO work with clients whose sales coverage models include indirect sales channels to:
• Define and document the client’s sales strategy (e.g., target markets, key sales situations, value propositions, sales processes)
• Map the indirect sales channels to the sales strategy
• Align sales assets with the key sales situations and selling processes
• Configure SAVO’s application software to enable the channel’s sales processes
We invite you to learn more about sales enablement and how FL&A and SAVO can help you use it to enhance the performance of your direct and indirect sales teams. You are welcome to contact Jim Fogarty at 312/558-4803 or jfogarty@franklynn.com.
Tags: Business, Distribution, management, Sales, strategy
Posted in Business · March 11th, 2010 · Comments (0)
If you look back at 2009 you will see that this was a very bad year for vacation bookings and I have to say that the recession was mostly to blame for all of this as many people could simply not afford to go away during this year. On the other hand more and more people chose to stick to having a vacation in their own country so local tourism was up simply because of this.
Last year even the biggest destinations like Orlando, Florida saw decreases in the amount of people that were visiting them. The great thing about this year is that the figures are once again looking very good indeed. Thanks partly to the new Harry Potter section of Island Of Adventure in Orlando the visits are once again looking up which is always good.
Of course Florida is not the only place people actually care about and bookings have soared for things like Barbados holidays and India holidays which is great. It is great that people are looking into their bank accounts once more and seeing that they have enough money to go away. This helps with stress because although taking a holiday within the same country is going to help it does not have the same effect as sitting in front of a sparkling shoreline watching the world go by. You cannot really compare somewhere like Devon to Barbados?
There are so many hotel resorts that you could look into visiting too from discover bay by Rex resorts to some of the fantastic Hilton hotels and Disney hotels jotted around the world.
So this summer do not repeat last year by just sitting around your house doing nothing, take a proper vacation!
If you are sitting around the home doing nothing at all then you are pretty much just wasting the vacation time that you have so you may as well be sat in the office typing away on your keyboard!
Tags: Business, hotels, Recession, Vacation
Posted in Travel · March 11th, 2010 · Comments (0)