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Five Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Forced to Work from Home
As businesses everywhere roll out mandatory work from home policies, amid the spread of COVID-19, it’s realistic to assume that, for many, working from home will be the new normal for quite a while. For many professionals, working from home means figuring out how to get things done in a new environment – one that…
Pro Active Referral Marketing
The fundamentals of marketing and growing a business, getting in front of the right people, and building trusting relationships have not changed. Professionals and businesses who do this on a consistent basis are able to build a thriving business, regardless of the market conditions. Case Study After 9/11 the travel industry went into a downturn,…
Do You Have a First-Rate Marketing System?
Organising your information is as important as the time you spend gaining an understanding of your market. Your market intelligence information is an important part of your firm’s equity. A first-rate marketing information system organizes your marketing and sales knowledge and becomes the central processing unit for all of your marketing activities. It helps you…
Focus + Accountability = Growth
“Accountability separates the wishers in life from the action-takers that care enough about their future to account for their daily actions” John Di Lemme As another year begins, many professionals are focusing their efforts on setting new business goals, or perhaps re-evaluating existing ones. Focusing on a task is easy; sustaining it over the longer…
Do I really need a full-time sales manager?
The answer to this question is probably not. Consider these statistics: Most sales managers are unable to control over 80% of the metrics they are held accountable for Approximately 66% of sales people miss their quota Only 46% say their pipeline is accurate. Someone must be in charge, of course, but it doesn’t have to…
Top Seven Mistakes Every Sales Leader Should Avoid
“A team is only as strong as its weakest link” Mark Gray Do you remember The Weakest Link? It was a television quiz show featuring a team of nine contestants. They would take turns to answer general knowledge questions, within a time limit, to create a ‘chain’ of nine correct answers in a row. At…
Six things you can learn from tow-truck drivers: it’s all in the numbers
I live on a busy street in East Melbourne near the CBD (downtown area). To make sure the traffic flows smoothly during peak hours there are clearway zones; cars are prohibited from parking between 7:00 am and 9:30 am, Monday to Friday. Between 4:30 pm and 6:30 pm, the same restriction applies to the other…
9 Warning Signs That Every Sales Leader Should Know
It’s often said that great athletes don’t always make the best coaches and managers. They know what to do, but they cannot communicate how to do it. I often see this in small- to mid-sized financial services firms. The owners, partners or directors, who are effective sales professionals in their own right, are having difficulty…
Your Number One Job is To Sell
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” Peter Drucker Some financial service professionals seem to believe that they are paid for what they know. This is a big mistake. The reality is that you are paid for persuading people to buy from you. You may understand the technical details of your product; you…
Hunters vs Trappers Which is Better?
There are basically two ways to build a successful financial services business: the hard way as a hunter or the easy way as a trapper. What’s the difference? Hunters are product centered; they concentrate on anything that moves. In the process, they invest a lot of time and energy but get little return on their…
