Partner recruitment is the foundation of a successful channel sales program. Without being able to identify and recruit the right partners and provide a value proposition to the decision makers at the VAR, you will be setting yourself and your company up for failure. Follow a set of real world examples of recruiting partners and structuring them correctly for the maximum impact.
If you run a channel team and are looking for a solid written process for retaining revenue producing partners, or if you are a Territory Manager tasked with finding …

You’ve probably heard the story of the golfer who steps up to the tee box and hits a wicked duck hook out of bounds.
Embarrassed, he reaches in his pocket, tees up another ball and again, hits another horrific twisting shot left out of bounds. Now angry and determined, he walks back to his bag, gets another ball, tees it up again, and duplicates his first two shots out of bounds to the left. In a fit of frustration, he slams his club into his bag, aggressively flings his club over …

Today, nobody seems to be around to answer their phones. You spend time cold calling, and all you get are voice-mail messages. You know people don’t bother calling back if they think it’s a sales call.

Because I kept running into this situation, I decided I had to leave a voice-mail message that would encourage prospects to call back. I found the best results came when I called people who are members of identifiable groups like the Chamber of Commerce. I could reference the group and gain some legitimacy for my …

If you have not had the opportunity to see The Matrix, you should go rent it and watch it a few times. Besides being just another sci-fi flick, The Matrix has a deeper meaning that can be directly applied to sales. I had a Matrix moment at work today.

Photo: ThomasThomas
Take the Red Pill.
Do you believe you are a better than average sales person? Have you just been waiting for that moment to present itself to be a superstar? Stop waiting. Anyone that tells you that ‘opportunity knocks’ is lying …

As a sales manager, you probably attend more meetings in a week than a squirrel has nuts stored for the winter. Meetings are the bane of any leader. The time they sap has been well documented and Dilbert has covered the humorous aspects of their drudgery from every angle. Which is why meetings are a huge opportunity for you to shine, says Brian Tracy, a leading consultant on personal and professional development and author of Speak to Win (AMACOM, 2008). Consider the following story.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure …

I am a huge fan of the social networking space. Never before have we been able to communicate and find people with similar interests so easily. You already know that I am a huge fan of LinkedIn and now there is a set of applications that can tie your LinkedIn account with your Facebook profile.
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and …

I grabbed some information on a fundamental event for success. It surprised me that Wikipedia actually makes the correlation between the military and business use of this process. I have yet to work for a company that puts these into place on any regular basis. As a sales professional you should put this to use after deals won and deals lost. Learning from your mistakes as well as your successes will make your sales more effective.

An After Action Review (AAR) is an assessment conducted after a project or major activity …

There are many options out there for a customer relationship manager (CRM) available. I guess they all have advantages and disadvantages but I have grown accustomed to SalesForce and have no issues with it. Besides using it for work to manage all my accounts and prospects, I also have a personal account that is available to anyone for free.
SalesForce has done a good job keeping up with the needs of there corporate customers by adding new features and having a consistent update pattern that they make visible to SalesForce admins. …

I’ve been experimenting with a new tool that has been making my online and blogging life much easier. As you may have noticed, I had created a simple site that pulls daily deals on computers, digital cameras and other geeky stuff that even Gizmodo and his great new layout would appreciate. This Daily Deals site is a work in progress and has made some improvements and will get better and more organized in the near future.
So this new tool I am using has allowed me to make some specific posts …

Wouldn’t it be great if staying focused and productive came as easy as breathing? Too often the daily interruptions eat away at the time and next thing you know you have only got half your project done or somethings came up that kept you from doing it all together. So I did some sarching for ways to be more focused and productive during the day.
David Choeng wrote a good post called 18 ways to stay focused and goes over the steps he takes to keep on track. from writing down …

A friend passed this article along to me knowing that I stay on top of these types of stories. Little did I know that they mentioned NetSuite as a pioneer of the Sales 2.0 era. Thanks Jake!
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It’s a question almost as old as commerce itself: Is selling an art or a science? For years, technology companies have been trying to transform the former into the latter. And for years, the results have largely been disappointing.
Think of those days as Sales 1.0. We’re now in the era …