Surviving the Sales Zombie Apocalypse: Is Your Team Brain Dead? By Frank Hurtte, River Heights Consulting In honor of Halloween and all things creepy and unsettling, let’s talk about a truly frightening business epidemic: Sales Zombies . You’ve seen them lurching around in the wild: salespeople moving through the motions , cold-calling without purpose, and chasing the same tired deals. Driven by habit instead of strategy, they slowly drain profits, eat away at customer loyalty, and leave a trail of missed opportunities. Here are four telltale signs your sales team might be showing symptoms of zombification, and how to bring them back to life. 1. Sales Zombies Don’t Understand Their Customers The best salespeople know how their customers make money, manage costs, and stay competitive. The undead ones? They don’t. Without understanding key business drivers like labor costs, inventory control, and waste, they can’t offer meaningful solutions or position themselves as t...

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the various software systems designed to assist in its implementation have been hot topics historically across distributor-land.  The truth is, many companies made the purchase, launched their efforts with the greatest intentions and then stumbled on the execution of such systems. Lack of performance has many root causes.  Some of the early CRM packages lacked important features, such as the ability to sync data with Outlook (which is commonly used by salespeople to manage calendars, contacts and daily activities.)  Other times, the distributor failed to understand how CRM systems interacted with their business, making the whole thing an exercise in dead-end data entry.  A few times, technical issues like the ability to quickly enter and access data from remote locations, made the process unmanageable.  In my opinion, however, will power could be characterized as the biggest driver of less than stellar results....

A couple of weeks ago, one of our  articles  covering sales compensation and commissions ran in two major industry trade publications.  Never in the previous 12 years of writing for this type of publication have we received anything even vaguely resembling the outpouring of thoughts and ideas.  Thinking more about the situation, it seems our industry is reconsidering and re-evaluating a six-decade old compensation plan. Many readers asked us to expound on the topic.  This is an attempt to provide some additional thoughts on the topic.  Do you pay commission on accounts where the salesperson does very little work? One of the biggest lies in our industry comes by way of the assigned account list.  Sometimes it’s geographical and other times it comes under the heading of “covering all the available accounts," but we continue to see sellers responsible for 100, 150 and even 250 customers.  Either way, it’s more than they can physicall...