Hello blog. Yes, it’s been awhile. Activity has been picking up lately. Among lots of other things, I presented at the MIT Sloan Sales Conference — How to Leverage SEs to Drive Business.

It strikes me as I talk to people at the conference and to our clients, that smart companies are investing now in their people and processes because they know he who invests in their people and processes will come out far ahead on the other side of this mess. Companies who crawled under a rock, and there are lots of those, will pay an even worse price when they crawl back out. Sadly, the smart people who realize this and are under a rock are forced to keep quiet, otherwise they’ll be the first to join the unemployment lines.

Here are a few musings to ponder.

How much money do SEs leave on the table in revenue? What is the SEs’ cost of sales? Why did a $multi-billion company say to us, “We’re spending a half billion dollars on our SEs every year, and we don’t know what we’re getting in return”? Why don’t companies know the impact of their SE operations?

If SEs have a highly technical job role, why do companies “flea dip” SEs through traditional business oriented sales training? Can we blame SEs for resenting this type of force-fed training?

Why does every traditional sales methodology treat Solution Closure like a fait accompli? Oh, by the way, Solution Closure just happens. Why do they think the months of effort SEs put into getting Solution Closure is just a footnote?

E-learning does a great job of teaching new technology and hard skills, so why is e-learning ineffective making soft sales skills stick in the field for the long-term?

Why do so many companies think that the CRM du jour will fix flawed sales processes?

If case studies have documented that SEs can generate 50x-300x in new revenue from every dollar spent on their process improvement, why then are SEs the first to be laid off?

If sales process quality investments have a payback of $450,000-$700,000 per person per year at a cost of about $2,100 per person (which can be amortized over 24-48 months), why then are companies choosing not to invest in sales process quality because of a few thousand dollars in one-time travel expenses? If the business case is such a no-brainer, what’s really going on?

When we try to lose weight, we don’t do so by standing on the scale every day. We lose weight by performing quality calorie burning activities which then take the weight off. Why do so many companies measure only revenue every day? Why don’t companies measure sales activity quality which will then drive revenue?

Why do so few hi-tech companies annually budget for sales process quality improvement? Why is sales process quality culture so lacking in so many hi-tech companies? Why don’t more companies run their sales operation like an ISO 900x or lean 6-sigma manufacturing operation?

Any other musings out there?

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /homepages/16/d105165054/htdocs/atcp.us/blog/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 4819