Phil Lauterjung

Posts Tagged ‘prospecting’

If you want to grow your business you must to use social media.  It’s as simple as that.

Just in case you need more proof I will share some recent stats from Econsultancy.  This is something they do every six months and it gives a good snapshot of where people are communicating and doing business.  Make no mistake, if you aren’t at least listening in on the conversations you are losing out on very valuable information.  Information regarding your industry, your competitors, and your potential customers is exchanged via social media every minute of every day.  Read more... (397 words, 2 images, estimated 1:35 mins reading time)

When one has been in sales for more than a few years you think you’ve got it down pretty well.  If this recession has had any positives, it’s that we have had to examine our professional assumptions.

Difficult times force us to face reality as it is, not as we thought it was.  If you haven’t worked through this process it’s not too late.  If you’ve been out of work and frustrated with the lack of opportunities, now is the time to reassess.  If you have a job with constant pressure to “make the numbers”, this is for you too.  Read more... (880 words, 2 images, estimated 3:31 mins reading time)

With every twist and turn in technology there are those who think that every new thing is a passing fad.  Quite honestly, sometimes they are right.  But, then there are broader movements within the overall scheme; and, those are the ones that we ignore at our own peril.

With the recent release of Forrester Research‘s third annual Social Technographics Profile called “The Broad Reach of Social Technologies”, we can now safely say that this Social Media thingy just might be here to stay.  There will be various tools and companies that don’t end up commanding a large presence, and some will fail; but, the concept of doing business using some form of Social Media will be necessary to survive.  Read more... (388 words, 3 images, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)

There are plenty of theories about this topic and much of it is wrong.  That is if you accept the findings of a study done by MIT (the brainiac university) and InsideSales.com.  They actually had a professor (Dr. James Oldroyd) with a PhD head the study, so I’m guessing that might have a little credibility with you.

They examined 3 years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand phone call attempts.

They focused on one question for this study:  Read more... (562 words, 5 images, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)

As the recession wears on more and more companies are trying to find sales nirvana.  The number of articles, postings, tips, tricks, and short cuts are increasing every day.  But, once again, reality bites.  Point-of-the-post alert!! – There are no short cuts, only hard work!!

A report released a few months ago by Dow Jones and CSO Insights on Sales Performance Optimization noted that the number of companies using a formal or dynamic sales process decreased this year.  The reason they concluded that happened was that it required hard work.  An astounding 63% of the companies surveyed only had a random or informal sales process in place.  I hope I don’t need to tell anyone that those companies had worse sales results than the 37% with a formal or dynamic sales process.  Read more... (483 words, 3 images, estimated 1:56 mins reading time)

YIKES!  It’s the end of June!  The Year is half gone!!

This is a time of year when most sales managers and their sales people come to the realization that their is half over.  They start to evaluate where they are with “the numbers”, and dread begins to set in if it doesn’t look good.  And that’s in a good year.  Most haven’t had to face an economy like we are dealing with today…ever!  In their entire life!  Read more... (544 words, 2 images, estimated 2:11 mins reading time)