On average 75% of Sales Managers Don’t Have a Sales Plan, But It Isn’t Too Late

Program title: It isn't Too Late to Have a Sales Plan for 2020

Did you know that on average only 25% of B2B sales managers have a sales plan? Aside from a forecast, compensation plan, and territory alignments and additions, 75% of sales managers aren’t creating a written, objective-strategies and tactics plan similar to a marketing plan. A sales forecast is not a sales plan.

Our guest this week, Matt McKnight, Founder of McKnight Advisors LLC, a Sales Xceleration Partner, says few managers have a SWOT, customer plan, target market programs, territory expansion strategies, a tactical action plan, customer attrition and margin calculators, product introduction schedules, or a multi-year revenue plan. In other words, they are flying blind and hoping to make forecast. Hope is not a sales plan. Listen and learn.

Our Guest Matt McKnight

Matt is the President and Founder of McKnight Advisors LLC, a Sales Xceleration Partner.  His firm helps customers launch, expand or improve their sales operations to accelerate revenue growth. With a 30-year history of sales leadership, Matt has extensive experience and success in start-up, private and public companies. His company’s approach is based on accountability, transparency, integrity, and trust focusing on the people, process and strategy to achieve sustained growth for its customers.

Matt McKnight can be reached at 847.867.5963 and at [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-mcknight-2463121/

Sales Xceleration Background (www.salesxceleration.com)

With over 100 Advisors across North America, Sales Xceleration provides outsourced sales consultants to small businesses and mid-sized corporations that want to drive revenue growth.  In 2019, Inc. magazine announced that Sales Xceleration is No. 2353 on its Annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. 

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Funnel Radio Channel is hosted byJames Obermayer, which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.    

How Podcasting Enhances Personal Branding

This show focuses on the advantages of personal branding by using podcasting as a medium to reach listeners on an authentic personal basis.  Contributors are Paul Roberts our producer/ station manager of the Funnel Radio Channel shows and Susan Finch, Vice President of Operations at our own Funnel Media Group.  During this program we discuss:

• The definition of personal branding.
• Why is it important?
• How was personal branding done in the past?
• What makes podcasting the most popular personal branding vehicle?
• How LinkedIn fits into personal branding.
• Why a resume is a person’s past performance - what have you done lately?
• How personal branding is what you carry forward and plan for the future.
• How podcasts are long-form storytelling media.

 Some Statistics about Podcasting:

• There are 700,000 active podcasts and more than 29 million podcast episodes.
• 165 million people (51% of the US population) have listened to a podcast and 32% are monthly podcast listeners 
• 22% of Americans, about 103 million people are weekly podcast listeners
• Podcasting has the best engagement rate among any consumption medium including T.V., FM/AM radio, owned music, and steamed music
• Podcast listeners are 45% more likely to have a college degree and 68% more likely to have a post-graduate degree.
• Podcast listeners are much more likely to be high net-worth individuals; 37% are more likely to have an income of $100,000+.
• The podcasting audience is gender-balanced.
• The average podcast listener listens to 7 different shows in an average week and subscribes to 6 different shows.
• Weekly podcasts are the most popular for frequency and reach vs. once a month or bi-weekly.

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Funnel Radio Channel is hosted byJames Obermayer, which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.    

How to get a 100% Meeting Response – Stu Heinecke

Direct Marketer and Cartoonist Stu Heinecke reveals how it is possible to use direct marketing techniques to achieve a 100% response rate by salespeople asking for meetings. In his previous book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing (2016) Heinecke discuss his campaign strategies which have brought his clients to unprecedented success in obtaining meetings with people unknown to the salesperson.

In ”Get the Meeting” he steps up further to reveal details about techniques and campaigns (which can be a campaign of one to one). He says that this isn’t only a marketing book. His concepts can work for an individual or hundreds of salespeople.

About Stu Heinecke

Stu Heinecke is a bestselling business author, a hall of fame-nominated marketer and one of The Wall Street Journal cartoonists.

In How to Get a Meeting with Anyone (2-2016), he introduced the world to "Contact Marketing," which uses micro-focused campaigns to connect with critically-important accounts and prospects.

Using the twenty categories of contact campaigns in the book, readers have gone on to produce explosive scaling of careers, businesses and lives. In Even More Outrageous Ways to Get a Meeting with Anyone (10-2019), Heinecke adds more techniques, tips and strategies, more than sixty illustrated case studies, an updated Contact Marketing model that sets a new baseline for response--at 100%--and introduces "Pocket Campaigns" as a replacement for business cards.

Get the Meeting!: An Illustrative Contact Marketing Playbook with detailed case studies.
• Kindle
$14.49

• Paperback
$24.95

Stu Heinecke can be reached at CartoonLink

Why Marketers are the Builders of Wealth – Matt Heinz

“A lot of companies don’t think of marketing as builders of wealth,” says Matt Heinz.  “Marketing done the right way can generate not just sales, not just revenue impact, but significant profit for the organization.”

In this fast-paced interview, Matt discusses how marketing acquires the mentality of being a profit center for the company.  He touches on how marketing must foster a culture of revenue responsibility.  He covers:

• Why the leverage marketing has is enormous
• Why marketing spends too much time on tactical measurement, not enough time thinking about revenue responsibility
• Technology is not your strategy, technology is an enabler of your strategy
• How marketing creates value across the entire funnel not just the top of the funnel
• The biggest obstacle for most companies to embrace revenue marketing is external, not internal
• Most marketers think of marketing as the marketing of more: more clicks, more leads, more likes more impressions, and more may not be better

About Matt Heinz

A prolific author and nationally recognized, award-winning blogger, Matt Heinz is President and Founder of Heinz Marketing with 20 years of marketing, business development and sales experience from a variety of organizations and industries. He is a dynamic speaker, memorable not only for his keen insight and humor but his actionable and motivating takeaways.  Matt’s career focuses on consistently delivering measurable results with greater sales, revenue growth, product success, and customer loyalty. Matt is a repeat winner of Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management and Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.  Matt restored his 105-year-old historic farmhouse in Kirkland, Washington with his wife, Beth and shares it with three young children, a dog, two rabbits, and seven chickens

Matt is the host of Sales Pipeline Radio

About Heinz Marketing

PIPELINE STRATEGY + MARKETING EXECUTION

Grow your B2B business. Increase your pipeline. Reach more of your customers.

Heinz Marketing is a B2B marketing and sales acceleration firm that delivers measurable revenue results. Every strategy, tactic, and action has a specific, measured purpose. Most firms focus on their activities. We promote the outcomes.

We are sales pipeline strategy people at heart – math marketers and sales strategists who embrace revenue responsibility. We know that what really matters is sales pipeline, closing business and accelerating revenue. Period.

Our proven methodology delivers real B2B results based on buyer insights, market-driven best practices, and rapid feedback loop to improve and sustain the results you see.

•  DEMAND GENERATION
•  PIPELINE MANAGEMENT
•  SALES ENABLEMENT
•  CONTENT STRATEGY
•  INSIDE SALES EFFECTIVENESS
•  MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

 Heinz Marketing Inc  8201 164th Ave NE #200Redmond, WA98052   877-291-0006

 www.heinzmarketing.com

Heinz on LinkedIn

How to Manage Prospects in a New and Productive Way

In the chaos of the marketing and sales tech stack, it is easy for marketing management to be misled into thinking the prospect’s experience is taken care of by the CRM system, Marketing Automation and eventually salespeople, but this isn’t the case.

Author, sales guru, and lead generation professional Dan McDade, is our guest from Prospect-Experience  and he discusses the over-looked field of prospect experience management. McDade says this failure is needlessly costing companies 10-20% of closed sales every month.

McDade has a history of knowledge in the sales lead management and lead generation fields having been the CEO of PointClear for 20 plus years. He is now the managing partners of Prospect-Experience which solves the weaknesses in B2B companies he sought to repair when the leads he created for clients went begging for attention from his clients sales and marketing people. 

CSO Insight Study Results are Troubling – Has the Canary Died Yet?

CSO Insight Study Results are Troubling – Has the Canary Died Yet?

Seleste Lunsford, Chief Research Officer of CSO Insights discusses the startling results of their latest World-Class Sales Performance Study: All that Glitters is Not Gold, with Funnel Radio host Jim Obermayer.  Lunsford talks about how the respondents in the study reported increases in quota attainment and revenue last year, however, key metrics show a decrease in adherence to sales best practices from previous studies.  The authors of the study state that there is possibly a misleading nature of sales effectiveness metrics collected from the nearly 1,000 sales organizations.   Is this a canary in the coal mine scenario?

The survey shows that world-class sales organizations have systems driving performance that smaller organizations lack.

1. Why is the report so important this year?
2. What was the triggering event that prompted the study?
3. Is this study generally only about companies with large ticket products and services?
4. What are the most startling results?
5. What are the sales effectiveness metrics that alarmed you?
6. Does the study tell the reader what to do about the failures?

 About the report and how to get a copy:  

“All that glitters is NOT GOLD” 2019 World-Class Sales Practices Study

Sections:

Section I: The Deceptively Shiny State of Sales

Section II: Customer Engagement

Section III: Performance Support

Section IV: Strategy Alignment

Study Parameters:

The 2019 World-Class Sales Practices Study collected data from more than 1,500 respondents from January through March 2019. The analysis was conducted on responses from 949 sales leaders. This sample was global in nature and spans across B2B industries, with particularly strong representation from the technology, manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, and banking/finance sectors.

GET THE REPORT

GET THE REPORT SUMMARY

About Seleste Lunsford

Seleste Lunsford has consulted with sales and service organizations for more than 20 years, helping them acquire, grow and retain client relationships. As Managing Director of CSO Insights, Seleste guides CSO Insights’ research focus areas and define its market deliverables.

She has co-authored two books, “Secrets of Top-Performing Salespeople” and “Strategies that Win Sales.” She’s proud to have supported some of the world’s most recognized companies including AAA, Alliance Bernstein, American Express, Arrow Electronics, Citibank, Convergys, U.S. Department of Defense, Office Depot, Traveler’s Insurance, and Verizon Wireless.

About CSO Insights

Independent research backed by one of the world’s premier selling and service brands

 CSO Insights is the independent research arm within Miller Heiman Group^TM, dedicated to improving the performance and productivity of complex B2B sales. The CSO Insights team of respected analysts provides sales leaders with the research, data, expertise, and best practices required to build sustainable strategies for sales performance improvement. CSO Insights’ annual sales effectiveness studies, along with its benchmarking capabilities, are industry standards for sales leaders seeking operational and behavioral insights into how to improve their sales performance and to gain holistic assessments of their selling and sales management efficacy. Annual research studies address sales and service best practices, sales enablement and sales performance optimization.

When No One in Your Company Agrees about the Definition of a Qualified Lead

It is easy for marketing management to be misled into thinking the prospect’s experience is taken care of by the CRM system, Marketing Automation and eventually salespeople, but this isn’t the case. 

The more we automate the more we rely on software to do a job that needs a personal touch. 

Author, sales guru, and lead generation professional Dan McDade, is our guest from Prospect-Experience and he discusses the over-looked field of prospect experience management. McDade says this failure is needlessly costing companies 10-20% of closed sales every month.  This except is taken from his original program which can be heard here:

The Prospect Experience Isn’t Marketing Automation or CRM

McDade has a history of knowledge in the sales lead management and lead generation fields having been the CEO of PointClear for 20 plus years. He is now the managing partners of Prospect-Experience which solves the weaknesses in B2B companies he sought to repair when the leads he created for clients went begging for attention from his clients sales and marketing people. 

How to Use Your Leadership Superpowers

Let’s face it, we’d all like to think we’re great leaders, but thinking isn’t getting and I’ve heard managers admit that deep inside, they have doubts about their ability to lead. Our guest today, Professor Bryan Bennett,  believes that inside of every manager there can be Superpowers if tapped and nurtured. In this program with host Jim Obermayer, Professor Bennett tells us why you have superpowers that can be accessed and appreciated by your team. Professor Bennett is an author, professor, consultant and data scientist.

• What are leadership superpowers?
• How did you arrive at this concept?
• How many of these superpowers does a leader need to have to be effective?
• Explain how leaders can obtain these superpowers?
• Who are some of the leaders you’ve met who possess some of these superpowers?
• Are there any limitations to these superpowers?

 About Our Guest

Professor Bennett is the Executive Director and founder of the Healthcare Center of Excellence. He is the primary researcher and blogger for the Center of Excellence website as well as a blogger for the HIMSS Future Care website on the subjects of Big Data and healthcare technology transformation.

Professor
He is a course developer and adjunct professor for Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies where he is responsible for the development and teaching of predictive analytics management courses for international and domestic markets. He also teaches consumer behavior for West Virginia University’s Integrated Marketing Communications graduate program as well as leadership and analytics courses for Judson University’s Management and Leadership program.

Author
He is the author of Competing on Healthcare Analytics: The Foundational Approach to Population Health Analytics. The book is a practical guide to implementing population health analytics and makes a clear argument for how an analytics initiative should be implemented using his foundational approach.

Consultant / Data Scientist

He started the Center of Excellence after hearing the challenges healthcare executives were having to implement predictive analytics programs. Many were concerned with ‘reinventing the wheel’ when it comes to analytics since successes experienced by other healthcare organizations were not being shared and they were challenged with identifying and keeping analytical talent. He is a certified data scientist and certified lean six sigma green belt.

Scout by Miller Heiman Drives Seller Actions and Changes Outcomes with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Miller Heiman Group, the flagship 40-year-old company in the sales training and consulting space, has introduced integration of “Scout” for Microsoft Dynamics. In this program, Dana Hamerschlag, Chief Product Officer of Miller Heiman Group, discusses how Scout improves daily sales productivity and CRM compliance which frees up face to face sales time.  Hamerschlag also explains what tools sellers should focus on to get the most out of their CRM.

About our Guest

Dana Hamerschlag is the Chief Product Officer with Miller Heiman. In her role at Miller Heiman Group, Dana leads the global product organization and is driving the continued innovation of technology solutions.

Dana brings more than 15 years of experience in technology companies backed by venture capital and private equity, where she has run product management, product marketing, strategy, and operations. Previously, she served as Vice President of Product Management at Ellucian, where she led the CRM business and significantly grew revenue from $0 to $38 million, paving the way for a $3.5 billion transaction.  Dana spent the early part of her career at The Boston Consulting Group.

 About Miller Heiman Group

 Miller Heiman Group is the global leader in providing organizations sales methodology plus sales technology to drive revenue and change business outcomes. The company’s training, consulting, technology and research solutions align process, people, tools, data, and analytics to prepare sales and service organizations for the future of selling. For more information, visit www.millerheimangroup.com.

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Funnel Radio is hosted by James Obermayer and sponsored by the radio/podcast company the Funnel Media Group LLC.

CSO Insights’ Surprising Results: Revenue Up, Performance Down

Seleste Lunsford, Chief Research Officer of CSO Insights discusses the surprising results of their latest Sales Performance study with Funnel Radio host Jim Obermayer. She talks about how the 900  companies in the study report that 95% are on their revenue plan and yet other parts of the report show some disturbing sales performance outcomes that show there could be trouble on the horizon. It appears companies are hiring more sales reps, but sales performance is down per rep; this means sales expenses are up and with any downturn there will be large problems.

About the report and how to get a copy:  

Selling in the Age of Ceaseless Change: 2018-2019 Sales Performance Study.  

Sections:

• Revenue Are up Sales Performance is Not.
• Customer-Centricity Separates Top-Performing Organizations
• Lead Generation Suffers from Organization Silos
• Planning improves New Account Capture
• Account Renewals Dominate Revenues
• Win Rates of Forecasted Deals Vex Sales Leaders

Roughly 900 global sales leaders were surveyed to identify the four main objectives underpinning their performance improvement efforts in the coming 12 months. These main objectives were improving lead generation, capturing new accounts, expanding penetration into existing customers, and increasing win rates. The purpose of this report is to show how sales organizations today are performing in terms of these objectives, how that compares to recent years and what successful companies are doing that’s working for improving sales performance.

GET THE REPORT

GET THE REPORT SUMMARY

About Seleste Lunsford

Seleste Lunsford has consulted with sales and service organizations for more than 20 years, helping them acquire, grow and retain client relationships. As Managing Director of CSO Insights, Seleste guides CSO Insights’ research focus areas and define its market deliverables. An experienced business leader, Seleste has led a range of consulting, product development, professional services and operations functions.

She has co-authored two books, “Secrets of Top-Performing Salespeople” and “Strategies that Win Sales.” She’s also written articles on sales effectiveness found in Selling Power, Entrepreneur, Chief Learning Officer and PharmaVoice, as well as DestinationCRM.com and HR.com. She’s proud to have supported some of the world’s most recognized companies including AAA, Alliance Bernstein, American Express, Arrow Electronics, Citibank, Convergys, U.S. Department of Defense, Office Depot, Traveler’s Insurance and Verizon Wireless.

Seleste earned both her bachelor’s degree and MBA from Florida State University.

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Funnel Radio is hosted by James Obermayer and sponsored by the radio/podcast company the Funnel Media Group LLC.