==============================================================================================
June 23, 2005 http://www.thecompetitiveadvantage.net
==============================================================================================
You have received this newsletter as part of your subscription to Sales & Marketing Strategies and News Magazine. Information on unsubscribing to this email newsletter is located at the bottom of this email.
=========================SPONSOR=============================================================
BEN…A One-of-a-kind Business Email Network
Reach over 5 MILLION qualified business professionals from 420 response list sources including magazine and newsletter subscribers, product buyers, book and seminar buyers, and conference attendees. Hundreds of selectable data elements available to make your campaign scalable. Select from job function, industry, sales volume, employee size, products purchased, and geography.

Email Chris at chris.longo@epostdirect.com or call him at 845-731-3824 for more information.
==============================================================================================
CONTENTS:

==============================================================================================
Avoid the 20 Most Common Sales Errors

Successful selling requires you to perform certain skills proficiently and consistently. If your sales results aren’t what they should be, it’s likely that your problem areas are among those listed below. Even if you’re a stellar performer, checking this list periodically will help you to recognize and overcome weaknesses. Stand back and make an objective analysis of your performance. When dealing with prospects, do you:

Adapted from Sales Techniques, William T. Brooks, Briefcase Books Series, McGraw-Hill and CWL Publishing Enterprises, www.McGraw-Hill.com.
=========================SPONSOR============================================================
Hiring the Wrong Person Costs You Three Times Their Annual Salary
The stakes are high when you're recruiting.  A $50,000 employee costs you $150.000; a $150,000 employee costs you $450,000.  That's for starters.  There's also lost opportunity cost…plus lost business, potential customers and momentum!  

With the Hiring the Best system, you'll know without a doubt which person is best for the job and your company.  This Multi-media program reveals a simple way to know your job applicants before you hire them. It includes the Top Performer Profiler, our data base of interview questions on CD-ROM and an audio cassette training tape.

For more information go to: http://www.briefings.com/promo_top.php?maingroup=PROMO_46
==============================================================================================
Increasing Your Earning Potential
By Brian Tracy, best-selling author

Today, with increased turbulence and change in the national and global economy, a person starting work can expect to have five full-time careers between the ages of 21 and 65, and 14 full-time jobs lasting two years or more.  According to Fortune magazine, fully 40 percent of American employees in the 21st Century will be “contingency” workers. This means that they will never work permanently for another company.  They will continue to move as needed, from company to company, earning less money than full-time employees and accruing very few benefits.

Imagine what your job will look like five years from today. Since knowledge in your sales or marketing field is probably doubling every five years, this means that fully 20% of your knowledge and your ability in your field is becoming obsolete each year.  In five years, you will be doing a brand new job with brand new skills and abilities. Ask yourself, “What parts of my knowledge, skills and work are becoming obsolete?  What am I doing today that is different than what I was doing one year ago and two years ago?” What are
you likely to be doing one or five years from today? What knowledge and skills will you need and how will you acquire them? What is your plan for your economic and financial future?

We are in the knowledge age. The chief factors of production are knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to achieving results for other people. Your earning ability today is largely dependent upon your knowledge, skill and your ability to combine that knowledge and skill in such a way that you contribute value for which customers are going to pay.

The Law of Three says that you must contribute three dollars of profit for every dollar that you wish to earn in salary.  It costs a company bout double your salary to employ you in terms of space, benefits, supervision and investment in furniture, fixtures and other resources.

For a company to hire you, it must make a profit on what it pays you. To position yourself for tomorrow, here is one of the most important rules you will ever learn: “The future belongs to the competent.” The future belongs to those men and women who are very good at what they do. It used to be that you needed to be excellent to rise above the competition in your industry. Today, you must be excellent even to keep your job in your industry.

The marketplace is a stern taskmaster. Your earning ability is largely determined by the
perception of excellence, quality and value that others have of you and what you do. 

Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive. It's just the way our economy works.

To earn more, you must learn more. You are maxed out today at your current
level of knowledge and skill. However much you are earning at this moment is the maximum you can earn without learning and practicing something new
and different.

And here's the rub. Your accumulated knowledge and experience is becoming obsolete bit by bit, day by day. The knowledge in your field is doubling every three to five years.  That means that your knowledge must double every three to five years just for you to stay even.

The solution to the dilemma of unavoidable change and restructuring is continuous self-development. Your personal knowledge and your ability to apply that knowledge are your most valuable assets. To stay on top of your world, you must continually add to your knowledge and your ability.  You must continually build up your mental assets if you want to enjoy a continuous return on your investment. And only by building on your current assets do you stop them from deteriorating.

By engaging in continuous self-improvement, you can put yourself behind the wheel of your own life.  By learning more, you prepare yourself to earn more. You position yourself for tomorrow by developing the knowledge and skills that you need to be a valuable and productive part of our economy, no matter which direction it goes.

Brian Tracy he has produced more than 300 audio/video programs and has written 28 books, including recently-released The Psychology of Selling. He can be reached at (858) 481-2977 or www.briantracy.com.
=========================SPONSOR============================================================
Telemarketing Responsibility - Compliance in Today’s Market
A 90-Minute Audio Conference Scheduled For:
June 30, 2005
1:30 - 3:00 PM Eastern Time

Across many industries, the telephone has always been a powerful marketing tool. In the wake of Do Not Call legislation, the future of telemarketing belongs to those who embrace the principles of compliance and permission marketing. The National Do-Not-Call is here to stay, but the news isn't all bad. The regulation requires companies to comply but also allows them to call consumers under several conditions. This audio conference clearly explains how you can be in compliance, while thriving within the reality of today's highly regulated environment.

For more information visit www.salesandmarketingnews.com or call (804) 762-9600.
==============================================================================================
Sales Organizations Must Address Four Pressure Points
From Forum Corp., Boston

Organizations that want to achieve and sustain higher sales should pay greater attention to four make-or-break “pressure points,” according to a study by The Forum Corp., an organizational learning consultancy.

The survey of 111 executives from 96 of the world’s leading companies found that four strategically-integrated areas can dictate a sales organization’s success in today’s highly competitive sales environment. They are:

Sales managers’ skills: Forum’s research determined that sales managers at higher-performing sales organizations are significantly stronger in each of three critical management roles -- strategy executor, motivator and coach-- than their colleagues at lower-performing organizations. The implication: high-performing organizations will equip sales managers with the skills needed to become the versatile leaders they must be.

Internal sales climate: Forum’s research shows that higher-performing sales organizations are significantly stronger on four of six important climate factors: clarity, commitment, responsibility and recognition. (Both higher- and lower-performing organizations rate equally well on the two remaining factors of standards and teamwork.) The implication: high-performing organizations will equip sales managers with the skills to model expected behaviors, establish a tone of cooperation, teamwork and excellence, and enable salespeople to accomplish their goals while stretching their abilities.

Sales organization processes: Forum’s research reveals that higher-performing organizations rate higher on four important processes: opportunity management, performance management, strategic account management, and reward and recognition systems. The implication: high-performing organizations will adopt systems for managing both the opportunities in their pipelines and the performance of their people to ensure new leads are qualified and closed.

Salespeople’s skills: Forum’s research found that high-performing organizations are stronger at identifying qualified prospects and landing them as clients. The implication: organizations that regroup around the basics will improve their chances for the competitive challenges ahead.

“Our research clearly shows that an organization’s people and the way in which they are managed distinguish successful sales organizations from the also-rans in this increasingly challenging sales environment,” said Ron Koprowski, who heads Forum’s sales and service practice. “Paying attention to the four pressure points can create positive effects, unleashing potential that translates into more effective sales teams and managers, deeper customer relationships and – most importantly – more sales.”

To obtain a copy of Forum’s point of view paper on the topic, entitled “The Pressure Paradox,” or to obtain its research report “How Sales Forces Sustain Competitive Advantage,” visit Forum’s library at www.forum.com. Registration, which is free, is required.

The Forum Corp. is a leading, global organizational learning consultant serving medium-sized and large companies, including 130 members of the Fortune 1000. Visit Forum at www.forum.com.
=========================SPONSOR============================================================
Double Your Sales Team’s Effectiveness
You’ll discover practical solutions in every issue of Team Management Briefings to build and maintain a productive sales team.  It’s an affordable resource for effective team-building.  You and your sales reps can use this 8-page monthly newsletter to learn how to:

For more information go to: http://www.briefings.com/promo_top.php?maingroup=PROMO_47
==============================================================================================
Teach Reps to Develop Referrals, Decrease Cold Calls
By Jim Domanski

Felix Mendendez hates cold calls. In fact, he won’t make them. Yet he’s one of the top sales reps in his company. His secret? Referrals. He seeks referrals from customers whenever he can. The “Mendendez Method” of referral selling is a good one, so pay attention and teach it to your reps.

Why the big deal about referrals? In business-to-business selling, referrals close at 40%, 50% … heck, even 100%. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s a fact. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Here are two reasons why. First, when you call a referral, you have the common ground of the person who gave you the name. It’s not a cold call. You have a reason for calling, and most referrals listen to what you have to say. That’s half the battle.

Second, and perhaps more important, there’s the explicit or implied endorsement of you, your company and your product/service by the person who made the referral. That endorsement creates an immediate element of trust.

So why don’t more reps make sales the Mendendez way? Many reps avoid a veritable gold mine of leads for two reasons.

First, they don’t want to seem aggressive. You may think buyers don’t like being asked for referrals. But if you’ve done a good job selling the product and if the customer has gained from it, you’ve earned the right to ask.

Too pushy? Hey, get over it. The worst thing that could happen is that the customer will say “No.”

Second, they don’t know how. Let’s look at how Felix tackles referrals. I’ve monitored Felix several times over the last few months, and I’ve seen him use a simple two-step approach:

Jim Domanski is the president of Teleconcepts Consulting, a consulting and training firm specializing in outbound business-to-business telesales programs. He’s authored three books on the topic of telesales. Reach him at (613)591-1998 or on the Web: www.teleconceptsconsulting.com.
==============================================================================================
Integrate sales and marketing efforts
By Andrew Maydoney

For maximum success, companies should see the relationship with a customer as a continuum that begins well before the customer makes a buying decision and lasts long after they have made a commitment. It’s essential that sales and marketing departments are unified in the messages and attitudes they present to prospects and customers.

Some important steps to integrate marketing and sales teams include:

  1. Integrate individuals/personnel
    Set ground rules of interdependence and mutual respect where cross-functional presence is desired rather than required.
    Consider the physical layout of the teams. Weave the teams together physically as much as you reasonably can.
    Assure that all levels of the organization are included in the integration––leadership, management and staff.
  2. Integrate process/organization/operations
    Include representation from each discipline in key discussions and decisions.
    Walk in their shoes and learn their language: bring marketers to sales calls; bring sales people to focus group research or campaign planning sessions. Assure that each discipline is sensitive to the needs and challenges of the other.
    Don’t indulge negative slights or comments across disciplines.
  3. Integrate performance measurement
    Assure that individual and team value is measured, in part, against the successful integration of disciplines.
    Check in on integration progress as frequently as possible––at least twice per year.
    Celebrate successes as teams and with individuals from each discipline.
  4. Integrate the customer
    Instruct both sales and marketing to monitor the customer’s sense of real value.
    Assure that the organization presents only a customer-focused culture; not a sales culture and/or marketing culture.

Integration. Collaboration. Interdependence. While these terms all seem internally focused, they are, in fact, important acknowledgements that the complete customer experience is a key to the success of any organization or individual – including sales reps.

Adapted from “How to Integrate Sales and Marketing Efforts,” Andrew Maydoney, Sametz Blackstone Associates, www.sametz.com.
==============================================================================================
Six Steps to Achieving Greater Marketing Efficiencies 
By Chetan Saiya, CEO of Assetlink

Shorter product life cycles, simultaneous global product launches and increased focus on multi-channel, integrated campaign management are making it impossible to execute marketing processes manually. 

In addition, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is forcing marketing organizations to demonstrate transparency and accountability of their operations. As a result, the CMO is challenged with instituting efficient and measurable marketing processes.

Culturally, introducing efficiencies into the marketing function is not easy. Marketing teams pride themselves for their strategic thinking and creative skills. Efficient marketing operations management (MOM) often takes a back seat. The problem is further aggravated by heavy dependence on external partners for advertising, promotions, creative design and production. Well thought-out change management practices, combined with the right technology, can dramatically improve marketing efficiencies. Consequently, marketing teams become more available for greater strategic and creative thinking by automating mundane activities.

Six Simple Steps to Marketing Efficiencies
Using a Marketing Operations Management (MOM) solution, the CMO can create a marketing culture that will streamline marketing processes at both the operational and campaign level, will propel the organization to reduce waste, and will drive higher revenue returns. It is not as difficult as you may think if you leverage the MOM technology and follow these six simple steps:

  1. Communicate Marketing Objectives
    All too often, marketing teams tend to repeat marketing campaigns from one year to another based on their historical returns. The future value often changes based on market trends and competitive environment. This misalignment of business objectives and marketing execution is one of the biggest sources of inefficiencies.

    Rigorous quantification of business objectives into marketing performance indicators (MPI) result in marketing scorecards that can help the CMO consistently communicate marketing objective. MPIs such as brand awareness, market share, leads, customer satisfaction, etc. help marketing teams to align and fine-tune their marketing mix to achieve the marketing objectives. In addition, it helps marketing management to monitor if these objectives are being achieved during the course of execution of marketing activities.
  1. Define Marketing Plans
    Most marketing planning and budgeting activities tend to be manual, iterative and ad hoc exercises. The final plans are hidden behind mountains of spreadsheets and documents that are not visible to most stakeholders until the last minute. This results in constant and unnecessary urgencies and causes wasteful crisis-driven operations.

    Marketers need to define and create a standard, enterprise-wide online template that stores all the captured information as structured document. This will help marketers ensure the consistency of information, improve collaboration (among authors of the strategic plans and with upper management for the plan review) and automate the generation of reports showing the effect of marketing strategy with respect to marketing objectives, channels, segments and products. Marketers also need to define a consistent format for building an operational plan in terms of marketing activities or initiatives. For example, each marketing activity should have clearly defined parameters such as marketing objectives, products, segments, channels, expected results, etc., in addition to the budget and execution schedule. Taking the time to define a clear and consistent plan-template will ensure that the operational plan data is uniform throughout the organization, has the ability to automate the consolidation of budgets for financial analysis and can generate reports showing breakup of budgets by marketing objectives, channels, segments and products.
  1. Track Marketing Budgets
    Today, marketing managers and marketing/financial controllers are forced to spend a significant amount of time tracking budgets for marketing activities, tracking the associated invoices and following up with vendors for payments. Marketing related financial information tends to be processed three times; first, by marketing manager in an Excel spreadsheets, next by the marketing controller in an Access database and finally by the finance department in the ERP system. As a result, marketing groups have great difficulty adjusting budgets in response to new market and business realities since none of the information on budgets, commitments and spends is current. This makes it almost impossible for marketers to generate reports correlating their budgets with various marketing and business parameters, so it is never really clear to them where the money is being spent.

    By creating a single, online centralized system that integrates financial reporting with operational planning tools, marketers can submit the requests for purchase orders and forward invoices to the controllers.

    They can also share and integrate forecasting and financial scheduling data, track vendor information, vendor estimates and invoices.  More importantly, automating the budgeting functions enables marketers to make instantaneous adjustments in both budget and strategy to ensure optimum effectiveness.
  1. Streamline and Automate Marketing Workflows
    All to often project managers in marketing service departments are charged with coordinating large numbers of marketing projects related to product launches, advertising, promotions, sponsorships and events between marketing managers and external service providers using rudimentary tools such as spreadsheets and e-mails. Their communications with both marketing managers and external partners tends to be ad hoc, subjective and non-uniform, which leads to inconsistent results.

    Marketers need to define both uniform processes and templates in order to streamline communications between different stakeholders. By providing project managers with an online tool that manages workflow, they are able to capture and communicate marketing briefs, track project timelines and assign work to external partners. Further, by automating the tracking function, managers can use this information to integrate with operational planners and generate marketing briefs for executing marketing activities and integrate with budget managers to track vendor estimates and invoices per project.
  1. Control Marketing Assets and Improve Reuse
    Much time, effort and money is wasted due to a marketer’s inability to control and manage their marketing assets.  Traditionally, product and advertising photos, marketing collateral, logos, etc. are scattered across several media silos, geographical regions, marketing and product teams and even external agencies. Marketing managers and marketing services groups are forced to spend a significant amount of time and effort searching for them and wind up paying a substantial amount of money to external agencies for fulfillment of their requests. This inconvenience of accessing and retrieving marketing assets results in recurring repurchases and redesigns leading to further cost overruns and time delays.

    To overcome these obstacles, CMOs need to create a repository that houses all of their marketing assets and provides controlled access to employees and partners. For instance, by instituting a template driven artwork adaptation system, the marketing department can eliminate graphics production costs and time delays related to the modification of office stationery, customer communications pieces, marketing collateral and promotional items. By housing marketing assets in one centralized location, the entire marketing group will dramatically enhance the reuse of existing assets, resulting in huge cost and time savings.
  1. Manage Brands
    One of the most important and over-looked components of an effective marketing strategy is managing your company’s brand assets. As a CMO, you need to articulate both your brand strategy and brand essence to your marketing managers and define creative guidelines for external agencies if you want to ensure the consistent and accurate expressions of brands. All too often, companies find themselves investing a significant amount of money and effort in producing and distributing brand books and building and maintaining specialized brand Web sites. However, the information presented tends to be overwhelming, outdated and represents a “one-way communication” from the corporate headquarters to the markets.

    Savvy marketers know that by implementing a collaborative environment that enables brand managers and external suppliers to contribute brand related content, without requiring them to be experts in Internet technologies, results in the organization’s ability to access the most up-to-date visual identity elements and track its usage.

Chetan Saiya is the founder and CEO of Assetlink, a provider of integrated marketing operations management solutions serving Global 2000 companies. Contact Chetan at Chetan.Saiya@assetlink.com or 1-925-461-9490.
==============================================================================================
Sales and Marketing Strategies & News E-zine is published by Douglas Publications LLC.
Visit us at http://www.thecompetitiveadvantage.net.
==============================================================================================
For information on sponsorships for the Sales and Marketing Strategies & News E-zine, contact Curtis Wharton, (804) 762-9600, ext. 254 or cwharton@douglaspublications.com.
==============================================================================================
P.S. Help keep your co-workers informed! Pass this free e-subscription along!
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB224A2BCPS6E.
==============================================================================================