Customers care about a product’s benefits – not its features. You should too. It’s not that the technology, or innovation, that’s at the core of your product isn’t important; it’s just that, unless it delivers value to a customer, it doesn’t matter. It’s not that your lower price isn’t advantageous; it’s just that, until you create value in the mind of the buyer, the buyer isn’t interested and any price is too high. That’s the power of a well-crafted value proposition. It expresses your unique value, and gets the customer interested – it’s your promise to deliver.

Before The TAS Group, […]

Let me start by saying that I’m a huge Twitter fan. It’s the most immediate source of happenings on the planet.  Where other internet presences might like attending a lecture (an interactive one) or browsing a store, or conducting commerce in a one-to-one transaction, Twitter is more like the cocktail party or networking event.  Here you garner snippets, factoids, gossip and rumor, that yes, you can interact with, but all the time you should remember that Twitter’s not the place to sell.

And that’s the challenge for sales people with Twitter.  For marketing folks it is [or at least it should […]

I started my first business back in 1986 when I was in my mid-twenties.  It was a typical software start-up.  We didn’t have any money, so had to go about business the old-fashioned way - making profits from the outset.  When I say ‘we’ I use that in the royal sense.  Really there was only me for the first six months or so.   I was CEO, VP Sales, CTO, CFO, Director of Customer Services and everything else at the same time.  I was single, didn’t have a lot of commitments or overheads - so at least if I had a […]

A few things happened recently that, together, gave me cause to think about trust, the role it plays in our lives, and (for this post) in business.  Studies just published show that our trust levels are at an all-time low.  Main Street doesn’t trust Wall Street.  Joe Citizen is skeptical (if not paranoid) about what the government is doing, and Jane Employee doesn’t trust her company’s leadership.

Trust is one of the fundamental tenets on which today’s society exists. If, when lost in a city you don’t know, you ask someone for directions to the business meeting you’re attending, you generally […]

A recent comment on my blog by John Esposito, VP of sales at AMICAS, reminded me to write a post about his company’s successful implementation of a sales methodology last year.

I was delighted to present a brief case study at the recent Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston last month.

AMICAS had some very common sales-related business issues:

• Inconsistent sales performance
• Needed a common, manageable approach
• Very competitive, complex, political deals
• Ongoing qualification in dynamic customer environments
• Tracking complex deals over a year or more
• Minimal and ineffective opportunity planning
• Salesforce.com compliance critical

ES Research Group took AMICAS through a comprehensive and objective requirements assessment and guided them through a sales […]

Dave Stein has been blogging and twittering about his frustrated efforts to buy a new phone.  His tale of woe in trying to buy an iPhone from AT&T reminded me of a similar experience I had 8 years ago.  In some ways it seems not a lot has changed.

In 2001 my family and I moved back to Ireland from Seattle. We decided that we would not move back to Dublin.  We were finally going to give-up the big city life where much too much time was spent sitting in traffic and commuting to work. We had finally achieved a long-term goal […]

Think about the last time you made a big purchase. Perhaps it was something really major like a house or a car, or maybe something less dramatic like a replacement set of golf clubs. As you begin researching your purchase, your emotions are deeply engaged and, while you’re generally interested in making sure that whatever you are buying is within your price range, you’re focused on your needs. Is the house in the right location and big enough to do all the entertaining you’re planning? Can the technology in the new golf clubs compensate for a certain lack of technique, […]

When you think about it, most every personal interaction you have every day has something to do with social networking, or more accurately, your personal social network - your social net-worth.  Every meeting you have, email you send, call you make, tweet you tweet, text message you send, blog you write, tv show you watch, website you use, research you read, Facebooker you ‘friend’, twitterer tweeter you follow, report you write, newspaper you read, advert you see, question you ask, song you download, RSS feed you join, LinkedIn connection you accept, and presentation you make, all contribute to the texture of […]

There’s a lot of press about how the CRM companies are offering Social CRM capabilities within their product offerings.  Social media will increasingly be valuable for sales, service and marketing, so this is a good thing. When we (The TAS Group), implement our Sales Performance Automation solution, (Dealmaker) it often integrates with a company’s CRM system, so naturally I’m interested in how well the CRM companies are using social media themselves.  There’s an interesting site, called www.grader.com that grades your performance on Twitter, Facebook etc., so I plugged in some Twitter ids into that and I created a table of the […]

Here at The TAS Group, we’ve been pretty fortunate over the last few quarters.  Business has been going pretty well, and our Dealmaker business is really flying.  We were so pleased with the progress of our Sales Performance Automation business, we issued a press release last week.   To handle some of the increased activity we decided to add to our customer engagement team, and last week posted a job on LinkedIn for a Director of Customer Engagements. Maybe it’s a reflection of the economy, or perhaps what we’re doing with Sales Performance Automation is interesting, but we received over 100 applicants […]