What describes “challenger” personality?

1. Communicates new insights with executives (in their language)
2. Weaves their solution seamlessly with client’s needs and objectives
3. Imposes their will which drives productive customer action

The “challenger” imparts different insights based upon client audience with the ultimate goal of enterprise-wide consensus.  For example, CEOs want to know what they don’t know about their competition.  While CFOs will listen to unique and unknown ways to cut costs.  As a general rule, quantifiable business value is more substantive than soft returns (like increased customer satisfaction.)

Can a “challenger” personality be coached?  While most “challengers” are opinionated and even combative communicators, they consistently impart informed insights which earns credibility with the customer.  While friction is not sought, being informed and confident are fast becoming a requirement.  In my opinion, an assertive personality can in fact manifest in just about anybody.

LinkedIn provides you the ability with Advanced Search to find specific individuals within a specific business.  You can use Keywords to narrow the search to specific domain areas such as Operations Management or MES.

The possibilities are quite endless.

I suggest (as always) asking the question: what is the best way to reach you?

Direct questions typically receive direct answers.  Where you keep this vital piece of information is another question.  To my knowledge, no CRM tool captures this valuable tidbit of information.

BTW: if you simultaneously leave voice mail, send an email, and text, you may upset the recipient

Tweets are short and sweet, but most importantly they are current.  When communicating with business leaders, sharing a little competitive intelligence (for example) will go to establishing equal business stature.  It may just pique interest and be a catalyst for sponsorship and subsequent partnership.

However, the tools on the market today (which have come a long ways from the days when Scopus, Clarify, and Vantive were the big players) are quite flexible and productive.  While SFA tools are powerful, they won’t create a compelling “call to action” for your customers.  Closing will always be a manual process.

With microscopic-focus, identify what it will take to make a buying decision.  It may be internal based upon negative activity ratios or it may be external, such as feared competition.

• automated tracking and updating virtual sales team
• expanding sales and marketing reach across team
• easy transition/assignment of ownership
• strategic “divide and conquer” territory management

Camaraderie is nice to have, but expanded and improved territory coverage is a must.

Hopefully, management and sales agree on the answers but that is often not the case.

There is a break-even point (BEP) where adding an FTE (another sales person) is advised to optimize overall sales performance.  In this economy, companies carefully measure costs and expenses versus revenue.  However, companies often rely on ancient territory definitions which are not optimized.  An audit provides actionable insights; which can be derived by analyzing sales history (perhaps 4 trailing quarters) at a granular level (e.g. by products, services, new vs. recurring, direct vs. indirect, etc.)

I’m not trying to solve the unemployment problem, but if your company boasts a notion of “growth strategy” restructuring sales territories can accelerate revenues overall and result in new hires.

However, the language may be offensive to you.  Consider yourself disclaimed.

Here is the video:

Comments?

With this example, the Marketing organization focuses solely on email marketing.  The tactical requirement for this type of initiative is a robust database of contacts; it also requires data accuracy and integrity be consistently maintained.

Therefore, the perfect example of sales and marketing alignment here is having Sales department continually update Contacts in the marketing database (aka CRM database.)

What else might they be doing with their time?  It could be spent responding to internal emails, providing superfluous sales forecasts, but more likely the big time suck is when the sales model itself commands inordinate cycles that distract from pure sales activities.

Savvy sales organizations (albeit rather oppressive) manage sales teams by pure sales activities such as number of phone calls made, number of online presentations delivered, number of quotes provided, number of visits made, and so on.  In contrast, if your organization has adopted a sales model and methodology which by nature creates excessive administrative coordination you are losing valuable time which could otherwise be spent selling!