Todd Youngblood, Author at Modern Distribution Management

Posts By Todd Youngblood

‘Your stuff looks great, but I need a lower price.’ Every sales rep in every sales force in every distributor hears this statement or some variation of it virtually every day. Buyers are trained and paid to drive prices downward, and the fact is most are quite good at it. So what’s a distributor to do? Get used to it, because it’s a fact of life? Train the sales force (again) to be tougher negotiators? Hold firm and ‘fire’ those customers that refuse to play along with your margin objectives?

Each of those alternatives is viable. All of them have been and are being tried. As far as I can tell though, price pressure is not going away or even becoming less severe. Maybe there is another angle. Think about classifying the value proposition for each deal you offer on a 1 to 6 scale. …

This article looks at how to best communicate the benefits of CRM to your sales force.
 
According to the best research I can find, roughly two-thirds of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations fail. How can this be? After so many years, why haven’t sales leaders and CRM vendors figured this out?
 
On days when my patience is running short, my list of three CRM-Killers consists of resistance to change, intellectual laziness and fear of being exposed as not quite the sales superstar everybody thinks I am. On one level, this is right on target, and as a member of a sales team, you’ll be well-served to keep this 2X4 upside the head”style list in mind.
 
At a more pragmatic level, though, it’s more helpful to think in terms of …

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