Manage Smarter - Performance Gateway

Sales & Marketing Management Magazine

Smart Presentations: Handouts Are the "Word"
Sure, it's easy for you to create handouts from PowerPoint or Keynote, but are copies of your slides what your audience really needs? Probably not.

Smart Sales: Are Sales Tips Hazardous to Your Wealth?
For sales-tip-hungry reps, a little knowledge can be a bad thing.

Marketing Lowdown: Marketing the Firm
This column is dedicated to attorneys—that often maligned brunt-of-a-thousand-jokes group of pinstriped sharpsters. They need marketing advice, too.

A Site for Satisfied Eyes
When it comes to closing sales at Toshiba America Medical Systems, the company has a secret weapon: its show sites and headquarters visits.

A Marketing Miracle Cure: Gamma Women
With the economy turned on its head, marketers just don't know what to do anymore. But researchers may have discovered the cure to this ailing market—interconnected women. And marketing to a web of women might just stick.

Brian Tracy University: Seven More Steps to Management Mastery
The one constant factor in sales management is change: continuous, never-ending, unavoidable and unexpected. You must be prepared to react and respond effectively to all events, especially when they aren't favorable.

SALES & MARKETING STRATEGY

Five Principles to Build Better Pipelines of Business Leads
Use these top tactics to generate more productive leads in these trying times.

The B2B "Bad Economy" Cure: Five Reasons Why Now Is the Time to Embrace New Product Blueprinting
Keeping the customers you already have is difficult in an age of consumer anxiety, vise-tight budgets and suddenly-Scrooge-like bankers. But actually growing your company in the way it needs to be grown in order to thrive long-term, well, it can feel like an impossible feat.

Eight Steps to Attracting New Business in a Lagging Economy
The economy is lagging and dragging. We've felt the effects in the United States. Now we're seeing global implications. So, how do you tackle economic uncertainty?

The Three "C's" to Successful Pipeline Building
Too many agencies prospect in fits and spurts. Too many agencies are terrible at marketing themselves. And too many agencies don't take the time to build an organized new business process. So, in other words, it's not just your agency.

MANAGEMENT

The User Adoption Conundrum: Six Ways to Get Your Employees to Use CRM Software
Here are six proven tips to help employees overcome the user adoption conundrum.

Improving Employee Engagement to Drive Business Performance
A compelling outcome of engagement research shows that an engaged workforce impacts business performance, and ultimately, shareholder value.

Shrink Not: Adjust the Sail and Seek "The New Gold Standard" of Leadership
Soaring gas prices, the US credit crunch and the grim events on Wall Street have many business owners scurrying to reduce costs and do more with less. But this natural and reflexive approach to economic uncertainty is often the worst path a business leader can take.

Awarding Excellence in Motivation
At yesterday's Circle of Excellence luncheon, the Incentive Marketing Association (IMA) presented awards to the 2008 award winners.

MEETINGS & TRAVEL

Five Annual Sales Meeting Ideas for the Best Sales Conference
Don't stress about planning that annual kick-off. Here are five ideas to help ensure your sales meeting is a success.

Making the Case for Travel (Part II)
While merchandise is a perfectly legitimate reward option in an incentive program, travel rewards are among the most popular choices, both for the manager creating the program and the people competing in it.

Feature Podcast: Green Meetings
Planners continue to seek out ways to make their meetings and events more green, but to do it in a meaningful and effective way.

Making the Case for Travel (Part II): Extended Version
A properly designed incentive plan starts with the company's desired business outcomes.

TRAINING

Super-Effective Sales Training, No Classroom Required
Let self-directed learning take your employees out of the classroom.

The Personal Touch: Four Ways to Enhance Your Listening Skills
By sharpening our listening skills, we can better pinpoint our customers' concerns—and find solutions that address their real problems.

Compensate to Motivate
No question, channeling the energy of a sales team can be a challenging endeavor. But here's an incontestable fact: How you compensate your reps determines where they invest their time and the results you get.

TECHNOLOGY

Stimulate User Communities and Social Networking: A Callidus Case Study
Community interactions can drive product development, improve tech support and bring together people normally separated by several time zones and thousands of miles.

MasterControl Case Study: What to Do When SEO Comes Up Short
What can a company already utilizing several traffic-generating tools do to avoid the inevitable sales plateau?

Working the Field: Field Service Research Summary
Customer expectations for faster, or even instantaneous, service are putting more and more demands on field service organizations, making it more difficult to ensure on-time arrival and high productivity.

Out of the Loop? Try a Mobile Lifeline
It's hard to make effective and timely decisions when you're cut off from pipeline activity or updated forecasts. Why not try a mobile solution?

Requires
Flash Player 9
Version Test
Download Flash