Since we participated in Jack Derby's Entreprenuer Launchpad program through the Providence RI Chamber,  I have been getting his monthly news letter and unlike most long winded blog type emails I get, I actually take time to read his because he always has a good story or insight for managing our business in a way that will enable us to deliver on our promis to our customers of better, fasterand greater value. This is the part that stuck out for me this month.

Hunting, Farming & Tracking will never be more important.

Everyone in Sales knows about the concept of dividing your sales functions into two different camps-Hunters and Farmers. It's our experience, that while most everyone understands the concept, few actually practice it formally and consistently. To the managers who question the tactic of dividing your salesforce into different functional selling teams, it should not a surprise to anyone that 2009 will be a year when saying "no" will be the norm for all new prospects. All the more reason that you should think about focusing your sales management efforts to identify and reward trained hunters who actually enjoy the highly organized process and the excitement of the hunt.

This year, if you have not done it already, you should think seriously about reorganizing your sales organization so that Hunters hunt only new customers while Farmers, who possess very different sales skill sets, are totally focused only on expansion. And finally, make sure that you don't waste the Hunters' time on cold calling. Bring in a trained Tracker at the front end who actually loves cold calling and does nothing but create, qualify and provide discovery for your leads. A Tracker is worth every penny, and actually it's not that many pennies, for this type of person.

2009 should be a year focused on the strategy of Land & Expand, and, in order to that, you should think about formally dividing your salesforce. In our estimation, Dave Fitzgerald, the VP of Sales, Marketing & Service at Brainshark, is one of the best examples of this with his Red, Blue and Yellow sales teams-all focused on individual sales tasks of hunting, expansion and renewals. Highly effective not only in the significant results that the guys produce, but also very rewarding to the individual salespeople since there are very clear guidelines and processes relative to each team.

Find more great information and insight on Jacks site: www.derbymanagement.com

CN

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Ok I know it has been a while but my standard excuse is that I have been busy working... well is this not always the case? :-) Well things should be better now that we are on a roll with our new project management team and the fact we have resolved a few internal projects that are going to free up my time to get in here more often...

Our new SEO guru Freedom Flynn sent me this articleand I found it to be very interesting and worth you all taking a look: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4416/Inbound-Marketing-the-Next-Phase-of-Marketing-on-the-Web/?source=email_PM1208

We are heading into a bit of a crazy time where folks are going to need to do more with less and be very wise with how they spend there money. Hopefully we can make the case and prove that we can be a good resource for you to work through this process as far as you web tools and portal development needs.

This month we are releasing some great new training for info@hand. We believe it is the first of its kind. We have built the first four courses with a nice interactive interface and around 80 modules of topic related content. These are accompanied by training guides and skill retention quizzes. Users can even take tests online and print out certificates. We also have put up a collection of excellent tutorials for components and modules for the new Joomla 1.5 framework.  You can check all of this out at http://www.infoathand.us/ or cut to the chase with our training landing page at http://training.infoathand.us/

We are finalizing the details for a series of webinars that we hope to begin in January and this will compliment our overall training program. You can sign up for our webinar newsletter and start to get the inside scoop at http://webinars.infoathand.us/ 

So there are a lot of things going on here... such as a couple new product launches in  the works, a great new hosting infrastructure... we have our own "Cloud' whoa... what a buzz word! And oh here comes another one... a virtual office is a "Green" office... kind of what we deliver in the way of web solutions for running your business. So stay tuned knowing we are here to help bring you fast innovations and a great team of professionals to support your projects and training requirements.

More to come...

CN

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