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 to you. Opportunity comes to the person who makes the effort to be better. No MBA program is going to knock on your door, you need to apply and attend. Chances are no major revenue event is going to drop on your desk, you need to look for it. Some people call it drinking the koolaid, but regardless you should do it. Once you buy in that you can be better and start behaving like a rockstar sales professional, the results will come. Sometimes in weeks sometimes in a few months but if you stay consistent taking the Red Pill will open your eyes to a world of possibilities you ...

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.

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 videos, and learn more about the people they meet. If you have a Facebook account already great. If you don't have one and are looking for a way to gather a larger network, get an account. I for one don't want a bazillion apps running in Facebook. I am going to just use the Professional Profile app to begin with.

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 that allows employees and leaders to discover (learn) what happened and why. It may be thought of as a professional discussion of an event that enable employees to understand why things happened during the progression of the process and to learn from that experience. Examples of when to use it are: introduction of a new product line in a production facility, after a busy holiday season in a retail store, introduction of a new computer system upgrade, after a major training activity, a change in procedures, etc. Also, the AAR does not have to be performed at the end of a project or activity. Rather, it can be performed after each ...

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. But this is not why I love SalesForce so much. Work anywhere SalesForce as a CRM solution allows a mobile workforce to always be connected. The old school days of field sales people running their business off of spreadsheets should be trashed. Being able to access your company information from any connected device like a computer or mobile phone allows sales people and executives to review and update important data anytime of the day from anywhere in the world. Customizing reports is easy People at the top are always asking for reports. SalesForce makes this fairly simple. You can set reports up to be available to everyone or make ...

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 just on making money online, monetization of your website and blog and internet marketing. I am no expert in this field. I have learned the skills I have from some of the most effective Online Marketing and Blog Monetization tips available. From ShoeMoney.com and DoshDosh.com and many others. This website has it's RSS feed add here, but you should take a look at SOCOM Marketing to see for yourself. I have added clips of their posts with direct links to their valuable information. If you are serious about making money online you should be following the people I have featured on SOCOM Marketing. If you have a site that you would ...

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 things to do, setting IM statuses and even picking out music that will not be distracting, he seems to cover most of the bases. Setup filters in your email. If you spend a lot of your time communicating and planning in front of your computer, chances are you deal with emails on a frequent basis. Setting up filters in your email client can be a great way of sorting out what’s important and urgent from personal stuff which can wait. Instead of dealing with a single Inbox with hundreds of unread email, you only need to deal with smaller folders categorised by project, priority and context.

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! ------------------- 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 of Sales 2.0. Your bottom line may never be the same. Remember the bad old days of sales-oriented technology? Customer relationship management systems that cost a fortune to install and crashed easily. Downloadable lists of sales leads filled with old or bogus data. E-mail marketing tools that targeted the wrong consumers. And on and on. Fortunately, software firms that target small companies with sales tools have been getting smarter and smarter. Following pioneers such as Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and NetSuite, a new generation of companies is offering easy-to-use, cheap (indeed, often free) technology that can supercharge the performance of your sales force--with minimal training and virtually none of the heavy-duty installation associated with ...

If you are a professional and trying to network with other people in your industry or get back in touch with past coworkers, LinkedIn is the tool you need. CNN Money wrote about this earlier in the year talking about the growth of the site and how it is used by some of the 8 million plus users. LinkedIn is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. It's not exactly a marketplace or a job site but rather a community of more than 8 million people who rely on one another to get things done. LinkedIn as I have said in earlier posts is an account that everyone in a professional environment should have and more importantly, something everyone should want to look its best. Think of your LinkedIn profile like your personal Hoovers page where people that find you should be given quality data.

Dave Cheong is another blogger that is working his was to entrepreneurship I was surfing through his past posts and I came across a headline that caught my eye and wanted to share it with all of you. I saw 10 R's to Apply if you want to Succeed and thought 'WTF' and had to read the entire post. In his post he give a great framework for people that want to succeed to follow. Being that I am an entrepreneur at heart I thought that all of the 10 R's are on the money.