Making A Difference Podcast

In this podcast, Ed Abrams, Vice President of Marketing for IBM's Small and Mid-sized Business talks about Social Business.  Social Business is all about engaging and interacting with our customers differently.  It's about creating a dialog and building the conversation.Listen and learn best practices about engaging your customers and building a Social Business!

Join me in this discussion of the role of Sales Operations in pulling everything together to help sales people be more productive.  Tony Walker is Vice President of Global Sales Operations for Enterasys.  He discusses the role of sales operations in making it easier for sales people to focus on selling

Every

week, I would venture there are over 100 blog posts or articles talking about

Social Business. Too often, the focus seems to be about how business should

leverage technology to more effectively reach customers. But, Vala Afshar, CMO

and CCO for Enterasys, would point out, Social is a mind set.   I hope

you enjoy this podcast as much as I enjoyed the discussion Vala and I had. It's

a little long--about 40 minutes, but you will find it well worth your time. If

you want to hear a passionate endorsement of the power of Social Business and

it's impact on the results we produce with our customers, look no further than

Vala. Enjoy the podcast! After you have listened to the podcast, I know you

will want more. Make sure order the book Vala and Brad Martin co-authored: The

Pursuit Of Social Business Excellence.

Time is one of the few things we has sales people control.  Yet too few sales people don't use their time well.  If we don't do this well--for ourselves, how will we ever make good use of the customer's time? In this podcast we will talk about several areas that impact our ability to leverage our time to maximum impact:   1.  Being purposeful 2.  Knowing our priorities 3.  Avoiding avoidance 4.  Diversions and excuses 5.  Presenteeism 6.  Planning and thinking time 7.  Valuing our time The podcast is not about techniques but focuses on a foundation for the highest effectiveness in leveraging your time.   Enjoy!

To succeed in virtually every endeavor, you have to have a game plan. I encounter too many sales professionals who don't have a game plan or are letting the game be defined and controlled by someone else--usually the competitor. There are six things that throw us off our game. We'll discuss these in this podcast: We have no game or plan in the first place We're playing in the wrong event We're in the right event, but don't have a game plan We're playing the competitor's game We get pissed off, react, and lose focus We think the customer is the opponent Maximize your ability to win. Develop and execute your game plan. Help your customers win in executing their game plan!

Whether we are sales people or managers, we spend a lot of time in Sales Review Meetings.  Too much of that time is wasted because we have a disorganized approach to these reviews. This podcast focuses on improving our effectiveness in conducting high impact reviews.  We cover: The different types of Sales Review Meetings:  Opportunity/Deal, Funnel/Pipeline, Sales Call, Territory, and Account Reviews. Separate these meetings, don't co-mingle agendas.  Each has a different objective, stick to that objective. Whats's the right cadence?  The frequency of these reviews depends on your business and your customers.  However, too often, we waste time by conducting meetings too frequently.  Set the right cadence for the meetings.