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Targeting – The Most Critical Tool for Growth during Tough Economic Times
Targeting is the process of selecting high potential customer accounts to receive intense sales focus. Goal setting translates that high potential into achievable numeric objectives, i.e. revenue and margin growth. Each Territory Manager should select a predetermined number of Target Growth Accounts (TGAs). Creating focus on this group of selected accounts doesn't mean a Territory Manager should ignore other accounts; he/she is always expected to service their entire territory. When making decisions regarding their time, however, they should always consider these selected Target Growth Accounts a priority.
Refuse to Lose!
When times get a little tough in selling, we often hear of some people (myself included) stating that they “refuse to participate in a recession.” As a matter of fact, this has been said so often that it is becoming a bit cliché. However, we do need to REFUSE some of the things that hold us back during tougher economic times. We do need to REFUSE to suffer mediocrity from ourselves or our people. We do need to REFUSE to drop our prices but instead raise the bar on our value. We need to REFUSE to let our customers get a better experience buying from a competitor.

Title: Buying An Existing Business Part IV of IX
This is the fourth part of a nine part series for buying an existing business. This part is a brief discussion of your small business plan.

Experts Provide Sales Management Help for 2009
A number of experts including, Jill Konrath, Leslie Buterin, Joanne Black, Andy Miller, Danita Bye, Glen Ebersole, Bill Guertin, Alan Rigg, Gregory Stebbins, Jonathan Farrington, and I helped Lee Salz complete his article, Sales Management Speaks Out on Sales Focus Strategy.

Trust is Better than Selling in Cold Calling
I’d like to introduce you to a radical new thought. In the old sales mindset, you’ve probably been trained to focus only on making the sale. You approach your cold calls with the idea of moving things towards a sales event.

Other sales focus Related Articles

New Business Development: Pipelines Wide and Deep
When conducting qualifying phone conversations with executives, there are objectives beyond getting a purchasing decision. These developmental objectives do not have a sales focus. The objective is not necessarily to identify a potential project, which would be a sales focus. The longer-term objective is to become a preferred provider enterprise-wide. Therefore, the information gathered during these phone conversations is different from a pure sales focus.

How to Avoid Getting Off Track When You Cold Call
Let’s say you’re on a cold call, and it’s going well. You have a strong connection with your potential client. But the conversation starts to wander off the topic. And you’re not sure how you can regain focus without the other person feeling pressured. Well, the traditional sales approach tells us to always focus on getting the sale. So when cold calling conversations start to wander, we’re taught to bring the focus back to our linear sales road, including having the potential client answer certain questions. The problem is that these questions only look like parts of a conversation. They’re actually covert attempts to make others to believe they need our solution.
How Well Are You Keeping Your Focus on Increasing Sales?
Keeping your focus on increasing sales may sound a little odd to you. You’re in sales or own your own small business of course your focus is on sales, or is it?
Challenging the 80:20 rule
It’s probably the best-known and most-repeated rule in sales: 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. The implication is that you should focus the majority of your sales efforts on those 20% to maximise your returns. But it’s also the most misunderstood and misused rule in sales. Slavishly following the 80:20 rule could cause you big, big problems.
Sales Productivity is All About Outcomes (so why focus on inputs?)
Selling business-to-business is all about outcomes (sell enough, and your commission will increase). Yet many companies looking to improve their results focus, today, on improving their inputs. B2B sales productivity requires a focus from beginning to end on outcomes. Sales efforts aren't productive if they don't yield sales and get prospects to progress towards sales. Proof of sales is dead easy. Proof of the latter is much harder. It's commonly based on what Rep have done and their impressions of their prospects' interests. Give Reps better, more precise, data on their prospects' interests, and help Reps (using this data) invest their efforts wisely, and their productivity will improve. Sales cycles will shrink. We've proven it.

Focus Your Sales Process on Your Sales Behaviors and Sales Skills, Not Your Prospect’s Behaviors
Would you agree that most sales processes be them 3 step, 5 step, 7 step or even 12 step focus on the prospect or what I prefer to call the potential customer? Given that everybody is focusing on the potential customer and that probably 50% to 80% of all sales targets and goals are not met, would that not suggest a different focus is required?
Competing on Price in a Down Market
When companies change their focus to customers really challenges rather than focus on sales, Sales go up as do profits.

Exclusive Short Term Revenue Focus, Long Term Business Issues
Revenue is king. It is the primary focus for most sales leaders, and the measuring stick for sales success. While revenue is an important indicator of sales success, sales leaders also need to broaden their focus to consider the sustainability of revenue over a long period of time. Sales leaders who focus on achieving repeatable results through an effective sales process will consistently realize the revenue they desire.
Why is Sales Management so Tough
This question has challenged every business and leader since even before the days of "The Death of a Salesman" a great book by Arthur Miller. Managing a sales force is quite different from selling to a customer. It requires different skill sets. And yet a common mistake we make when filling the Sales Managers position is that we take our top sales person and promote them to Sales Manager. That decision fails more often then it succeeds. The reason is simple --- "A Sales Managers primary responsibility is not to focus on selling". The Sales Managers primary responsibility is to focus on the promotion of sales. It's about leadership.

Target Sales Focus
In my sales development and business coaching work, I repeatedly see one shortcoming at the heart of my clients’ failure to thrive: a failure to focus on the narrowly defined, high ROI markets and product/service offerings that will help them secure greater market share and niche dominance that’s hard to budge in any economic climate. In the ebook, Target Sales Focus, I deconstruct the myths that encourage too many managers and CEOs to dilute their sales efforts on markets that are too broad, and then detail a step-by-step plan to concentrate their resources on targeted markets that deliver more – and more predictable – sales.
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