Manage Your Sales Carefully:-

OK. This one is for the sales managers. Grab a cup of coffee, and take a minute for a quick quiz. Daniel Sitter at the Idea Sellers blog has come up with some key questions to help determine if you're getting the most out of your B2B sales team. "Do your salespeople view you as an asset or a liability?" he asks. "How do you view your responsibilities?"

His quiz may help you determine your management style. Sitter asks, Do you regularly engage in any of the following?

* Request an itinerary from each salesperson for each week?
* Demand detailed call reports?
* Demand that all field decisions are approved by you?
* Regularly travel with your salespeople?
* Take charge of sales calls in the field?
* Regularly question your team's judgment and strategies?

If you answered yes to most of these questions, congratulations! You're an excellent sales manager—for novices. However, if your sales staff are trained professionals, the news isn't quite so good. With an approach like this, you may be stifling their creativity, and limiting their results, Sitter says. His advice? Try a more hands-off approach.

"A sharp sales manager encourages an individual's responsibility for their own success and development. A great sales manager creates an environment where sales professionals can thrive and continuously develop," he concludes.

The Po!nt: Trust your people. By training your B2B sales team to take more responsibility for their strategies and results, you may well boost your bottom line.

"It's hard to keep those marketing juices flowing if you are feeling bogged down," says Drew McLellan at his Marketing Minute blog. "Sometimes I have to give myself a reprieve. So I cone myself."

Say what?

It turns out that everyone in McLellan's office has a bright orange traffic cone. If placed in their doorway, it signals to their colleagues that they are coned—to be disturbed only if the building catches fire. Since the cone is sacrosanct, each can focus completely on creative pursuits without the threat of interruption.

If you'd like to give it a try, McLellan offers this advice:

* Choose your own cone—any object that will serve in your office as a universal symbol of Do Not Disturb.
* Turn off your phones; ignore your email; forget about those blogs you've been meaning to read.
* Cone yourself at least three times a week (90 minutes max). "[I]t's very frustrating to be on the other side of the cone and need to talk to someone who's been coned for 3 hours," he explains.
* Lead by example: always respect the cone of those you supervise.

Let's say your company has a great approach to customer service—you offer quality products or services, your front-line staff are friendly and knowledgeable and you respond quickly and effectively to any concern. As good as this scenario sounds, your customers might still consider you so-so if the competition is even better.

In a post at Inc.com's Marketing Blog, Michele Miller compares the experience of shopping at two health-food stores, each of which she visits at least once a week. When she's at Store A, employees offer what anyone would consider good customer service. "As they ring me up," she says, "we might chat for a moment about the weather or something from the morning newspaper. They'll throw a couple of samples into my bag and send me off with, 'Have a nice day.'" Sounds great, right?

But Store A has a problem called Store B, where "the clerks ask me how I liked that new protein powder I bought last week," she says, "or how my husband reacted to the smell of that macadamia nut lotion they saw me testing." This is when Miller notices that every time she goes to Store A the staff act like they've never seen her before.

"Guess which store just opened a fourth location to meet customer demand?" asks Miller, underscoring the health-food-based Marketing Inspiration. "It doesn't take the memory of an elephant to remember your customers or clients, just a little more awareness of the universe around you—and your patrons.

Released on----- 7th November, 2008