The Harvard Business Review July-August 2006 issue featured a number of thought leadership articles on sales. This week I met Jim Dickie who co-authored one of those articles entitled “Understanding What Your Sales Manager Is Up Against.” Barry is a partner at CSOInsights who specialise in benchmarking the challenges faced by today’s sales and marketing organizations. CSOInsights track trends in the use of people, process, technology and knowledge to improve sales effectiveness.
The 3 “Take Aways” for me from our discussion were:
1) Revenue Growth has become the No. 1. Priority for Executive Management for the first time in 5 years.
2) Optimising Lead-Generation Programs is the No. 1 Priority for Top Sales Management this year.
3) The July-August issue of HBR on Sales generated significantly greater than normal interest from readers, measured by the number of article reprints ordered.
All this goes to show that Sales is where it all begins and propsecting is where the sale starts. Remember Always Be Prospecting.