Seven Steps to Shorten Your Sales Cycle
Thu, Apr 11, 2024 | Posted by Bob Sherlock
Does your company provide customers with expensive business inputs?
Or are you crucial in other ways to your customers’ business success?
Does your company provide customers with expensive business inputs?
Or are you crucial in other ways to your customers’ business success?
Tue, Mar 2, 2021 — This is a love story with a business point. Around twenty five years ago Gordon, the whisky-loving half of a couple in Glencoe, Scotland, bought a limited production bottle of Macallan 1961. It was pricey, so he put it away in a cabinet in its original packaging to await a suitable occasion. Then he pretty much forgot about it. He found it in 2019 and thought, "Wow, we really do need to find an occasion to drink this." A few weeks later, an old friend came to town. Gordon and the pal opened the bottle and did a few pours. The whisky’s color, nose, and taste were superb, and they savored it greatly.
Tue, Apr 7, 2020 — Del Griffith (John Candy) and Neal Page (Steve Martin) are driving the wrong way on an Interstate highway at night. A motorist, driving in the correct lanes: “Hey, put your window down!” Page: “He wants something.” [rolls window down] Griffith: “Ah, he’s probably drunk.” Motorist and his passenger holler across the median: “You’re going the wrong way!!!” Page: “He says we’re going the wrong way.” Griffith: “Oh he’s drunk! How would he know where we’re going?” Page, nodding: “Yeahhh… how would HE know?” [Moments later, Griffith and Page narrowly escape a head-on collision with two tractor-trailers.] Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Paramount Pictures, 1987
Fri, Jun 15, 2018 — Like so many of us, Phil is pressed for time. An avid mountaineer, when he prepares for a climb he wants to train just enough that he can summit and descend in a safe amount of time. He has a strategy (certain amounts of running and stair-climbing) to achieve that fitness level. Last year a back injury precluded his usual training approach. The injury didn’t mean he couldn’t prepare to perform at the required level. However, it did force him to look for alternative strategies to train.
Fri, Aug 18, 2017 — Psst. I have a secret for you, CEO. How would you like to learn one easy, surefire way to immediately add more than 10 percent in operating profits to your bottom line? Before you declare this another attempt at “fake news,”– let me assure you, this is a legitimate, real, and practical offer. Though it requires very little in terms of effort to achieve – it does require a leap of faith, and resolve of focus, that many CEOs have either been reticent, or reluctant, to make.
Sun, Jul 31, 2016 — Artificial intelligence, or machine learning, is on the rise. From Siri to self-driving cars, new frameworks are becoming accessible to the mainstream, and products are growing increasingly "smarter." As massive quantitates of data are being plugged into predictive systems, this leads to a question of quality: How can we ensure the programs we put in place will understand the data we throw at them? Geoff Roach with Chief Outsiders argues that no matter how smart our machines become, humans will always need to be one step ahead.
Sat, Mar 19, 2016 — The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is flourishing, expanding, and boldly going where it’s never gone before—how do you know the right price for your service? The pay-as-you-use model that is widely employed by SaaS offerings has even propagated into areas like manufacturing, where such “value-in-use” strategies are gaining wide acceptance. For companies trying to ensure that this model is as remunerative as it can be, a SaaS offering has to ensure a properly balanced pricing structure. Furthermore, which attributes of our offerings support the highest value needs from our prospects, and how can we look at historical data to inform this pricing model?
Thu, Aug 20, 2015 — In a business environment characterized by recovery from a severe recession, seven years of tepid growth, high unemployment and underemployment, and the explosion of ecommerce (with the lowest price always just a click away), it’s no surprise that optimizing pricing to maximize revenues and/or profits is a critical issue for many businesses. But how does a business know when it can safely raise prices without losing market share? Is market share the right goal, or should it be bottom-line profit? Either way, what pricing optimization information do you need to achieve the chosen goal? If you are asking these questions, you are not alone. Only 15% of all businesses do any kind of systematic pricing study.
Thu, Aug 13, 2015 — In the end, there are three avenues to increasing your profit margins: cost, sales volume and price. In our experience, companies tend to focus on the first two, costs and sales, at the expense of the third, price. There are good reasons for this: any company that is competitive over the long term is very good at managing costs, continually measuring and reducing costs over time, and they have invested in elaborate processes and technologies just to stay in the game. Similarly, companies know their sales histories and are comfortable forecasting sales revenue, with a fair degree of precision, with mathematical models that have withstood the test of time.
Wed, Oct 30, 2013 — Your sales team defines price as what’s on the invoice. Your CFO defines price as ‘what we take to the bank’. Your customer says price is too high. Your pricing manager says that price doesn’t match our standard terms. Your distributor says they can’t make any money on your line. And it’s still Monday morning! What’s the right way to define and measure price? More importantly, how can you improve net price realization and take more money to the bank? I define price as what goes to the bank, after all discounts, returns, warranties, commissions and other deductions are taken into account. There are several elements to price management. The first is achieving the optimal price for each good or service. The second is managing your product mix and services to achieve the optimal price for a set of customer transactions.