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Sales Strategy – more than tactics & incremental growth

Corporate, business, and marketing strategies are often too broad, or too focused on either financial or brand results only as to offer any clear direction to a sales team. Which means the support, focus, direction, standards, and mission of a sales operation is often reduced to little more than generating more business at better margins.

Because of this broader focus on the bigger picture, sales strategies all too often become a series of tactical activities that do little more than support marketing. In the end all that this achieves is making sales an expensive, frustrating exercise with salespeople …

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The 8 Sales Management Essentials

Most sales managers have sales experience. It makes sense from a career path perspective – you’re good at selling so your next logical career step is into sales management.

However, this is where the logic usually comes unstuck because selling and sales management are not the same thing.

Like a lot of salespeople learn selling by default – they fall into a sales career rather study and learn it by design – the same goes for sales management. Sales management is the least trained area of the management disciplines. Like selling, too many sales managers are left to fend for themselves, often …

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Welcome to the age where less is more

Sales trend 4 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2021 is about the unexpected changes that COVID brought about in relation to brands.

By guest author Ben Peacock, Founder of Australia’s sustainability and brand purpose specialists, Republic of Everyone.

Meh.

Everything was going so well. Survey after survey was showing people’s concern for the environment was finally translating to sales of products that promised to help do something about it.

Recycled rubber sneakers, carbon neutral phone plans, cafes run by street kids…sustainability was seeing a boom the likes it had never seen before. …

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7 things you can do immediately to sell better now plus some extras

In September 2019 I wrote an article “7 things you can do immediately to improve your sales results in challenging markets” and while a lot has happened since, the core elements of this advice remain true. However, given the advent of Covid and the many lessons learned since, I’d like to include and emphasise the virtues of Trustworthiness, Cooperation and Gratitude because they underpin good business.

Many people’s perspectives and priorities have shifted in the last year beyond the mere matter of making money. They are closely examining their relationship to work, careers, each other …

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Are you treating symptoms or the cause? Doing sales assessment right

The competent carpenter’s saying is this: measure twice, cut once.

We know that selling is a complex role with many moving parts.

Producing great and consistent sales results as a salesperson and team is 80-90% reliant on Lead Indicators – the key Input Activities & Behaviours – the relevant knowledge, skills and mindset around sales & account planning, prospecting & new business development, solution selling & key account management, etc. that we, as professional sales people and teams, need to execute everyday on a consistent daily basis. The other 10-20% is reliant on the right sales strategy, sales processes & tools, training …

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The Phenomenon that is #March4JusticeAU

We are all presented with opportunities every day in myriads of ways. Whether we choose to pursue an opportunity is dependent upon many things. When an opportunity of a lifetime presented itself to me on Monday 1 March I decided to jump in boots and all. Definitely a sliding door moment for me.

This once in a lifetime opportunity was joining the March 4 Justice organising team at its inception.

How did #March4JusticeAU burst onto the scene so quickly and how did it capture the attention of the nation as well as the international media?

It started on Sunday 28 February 2021, when …

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Australian Consumers are for Australia

Sales trend 3 from the 12 Sales Trends for 2021 Report looks into how our buying behaviours changed in 2020, and what businesses can do to keep up with those changes.

By guest author Rebecca Varley – Roy Morgan

2020 brought some of the biggest changes we’ve ever seen, not just with respect to our behaviours, but also our attitudes. These changes have permeated through all aspects of our lives, including our shopping behaviours and attitudes.

Australian consumers have long shown a preference for purchasing Australian made products across a range of categories, not just food, with …

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No, we are not there yet – Achieving Equality in 2021

I am a bit tired and frustrated to be honest. I wasn’t expecting to start this article in honour of International Women’s Day 2021 this way, but here we are. I might be so bold as to claim that the majority of us (women) are tired of repeating ourselves over and over again and feeling like we keep fighting the same battles that were supposed to be won decades ago. I mean I was a teenager at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s – I am Woman hear me roar still rings in …

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The Big Reset Opportunity: Leadership, Sales Strategy & a United Purpose

Vladimir Lenin said over a century ago “There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.”

I think we can all relate to that at some time or another over the past 12 months.

The Big Reset Opportunity – Weeks where decades happen

We are at a particular time where we are resetting how we work. Some are going to keep on going remotely, others are going back to the office, whilst the majority is inclined towards a hybrid model. This, together with the changes in the market, place us at a moment ripe with opportunity because we can also reset …

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Our Fragility Has Been Exposed. Now What?

Sales trend 2 from the 12 Sales Trends for 2021 Report is about what Procurement can do to help businesses become thrivers and survivors.

By guest author Ben Shute, CEO of Comprara

For Barrett’s 12 Sales Trends Report last year, my article – We change, or we burn – argued that the Bronze Age collapse was a warning we should heed. Due to the complex logistical nature of the procurement process behind the production of bronze, the world of the Bronze Age was highly interconnected and interdependent. A drought in the Indus Valley, for instance, …

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