Ken Thoreson, from Acumen Management Group, a VARportal Business Service Provider member, shares quick insights focused on increasing your personal, professional and organizational growth. Personal Commitment: Building Your Vision for 2010
Building your business requires both leadership and management, and the first step in that journey is understanding the difference between the two. Leadership is the ability to make things happen by encouraging and channeling others' contributions, addressing important issues and acting as a catalyst for change and continuous improvement. Management is the skill of attaining predefined objectives with others' cooperation and effort.
The best companies, like other successful organizations, are led by individuals who have clear vision -- and the ability to establish specific objectives for working toward their organizational goals. Executives at partner companies that have leveled off, stalled or are struggling to break even may lack both vision and objectives.
Don’t forget to plan your 2010 sales Kick-off meeting and invite Ken to “set the stage” with a positive, enthusiastic Keynote.
Professional Commitment: Build Your Pipeline for 2010
What's a more cost-effective way of making a business-to-business sale? Saving the one-to-one sales calls until the end. Most of the fastest-growing IT services companies I know don't rely solely on one-to-one sales contacts to grow their business. Why? Because it's difficult to find effective salespeople, and often it takes too long for new salespeople to start showing a favorable return on the company's investment.
Instead, the more successful VARs, SIs, ISVs and IT consulting firms leverage lower cost-per-contact, one-to-many marketing tactics to address the front end of the sales pipeline: prospecting and qualifying. Then they focus their more costly one-to-one in-person sales contacts on the end of the pipeline: the heavy lifting of doing demos, crafting proposals and closing sales.
Invite Ken to speak at your next Sales Conference or Sales Kick off Meeting on THE POWER OF IMPACT-Amazing results, member of National Speakers Association
Organizational Commitment: Why Sales Certification Makes Sense for 2010
Adding sales value will be a critical success factor in 2010. This is true for organizations with five or fewer salespeople and certainly for those with more than 500.
With many clients, we simply work to install a three-week new-hire-on-board training program, and then build quarterly sales training programs that cover product/technical knowledge, sales skills, competition and company operations (CRM) industry awareness. These are designed to increase the professional value of the sales force.
Sales certification takes this concept one step further. Sales certification requires a philosophical commitment from management to building a strong sales culture. It will result in more analytical sales data, less turnover, higher margins and long-term client relationships. A sales certification program requires sales team training, testing and validating that the training has been accepted and acted upon by the sales team.
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