The Competitive Advantage

May 29, 2025

Churn Baby Churn!

One of the tools we use when onboarding a new client is something we call the ‘5-Year Revenue Review.’ It’s a report that your accounting team can easily provide: Revenue by Client by Year for the past 5 years. And what you can learn from it is interesting and eye-opening.

Many business leaders regularly look at revenue year-to-date and compare it to last-year-to-date. And that’s fine. That trouble is that even if there’s overall growth, it may be hiding problems lurking beneath the surface. But when look at a 5-year report, you’ll see gaps and trends in the data that a 2-year analysis can’t reveal.

April 30, 2025

The Job of a Sales Manager? To Manage AND Coach!

Part 4 of a 4-part series on managing seller-doers.

When we hear the term, “sales manager,” most people think about that person managing their sales team. Not only is that job description incomplete… it’s also wrong.

In a nutshell, the role of the sales manager is two-fold… to manage the sales process and systems and to coach the members of their sales team. Let me explain…

April 22, 2025

Create a Seller-Doer Commission Plan to Achieve Your Desired Results

Part 3 of a 4-part series on managing seller-doers.

In Part 1 of this series for those managing a team of seller-doers, I wrote about creating a sales culture in your organization. In Part 2, we explored the process for creating your sales plan. And in this part, we’ll talk about compensating your seller-doers for their sales efforts.

Introduction

There are too many types and variations of compensation plans to explore them all, so let’s focus on the most common structure: a base salary plus commission plan, where a commission is paid as a percentage of sales.

Why Sales Commissions?

There are two reasons that a firm would/should elect to install a commission plan for its seller-doers…

April 7, 2025

Create a Sales Plan for Your Seller-Doer Sales Team

Part 2 of a 4-part series on managing seller-doers.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored how to create a sales-friendly culture… that is, to help make your firm the kind of firm that likes, respects and appreciates what your seller-doers make possible for everyone else there.

Now, with your culture improving and a seller-doer sales team in place, it’s time to create your sales plan… that is, your “roadmap” to help you and your team achieve sales success. Following is an outline to help you create that plan:

April 1, 2025

Creating a Sales-Friendly Culture

Part 1 of a 4-part series on managing seller-doers.

The vast majority of salespeople at Research firms are “seller-doers.” That is, they are senior managers, subject matter experts or longtime researchers, who have also been tasked with selling… part-time. And not surprisingly, their sales manager is most often the business owner, president or managing director who has also been tasked with managing the seller-doers… part-time.

If you’re one of those sales managers (with little or, likely, no formal sales management training), this 4-part blog series on sales management will cover the fundamentals to make sure you get the most from your seller-doer sales team.

February 25, 2025

My Best Sales Tip? Ask more questions!

I was invited last week to be a guest lecturer at UT-Southern – a satellite campus for the University of Tennessee – located in the town of Pulaski. It’s a quaint campus about a 60-mile drive south from where I live.

This was my third visit to the campus, and this time, I was speaking to an upper-level entrepreneurship class (note: every student in the class had a business they were planning to launch upon graduation… and two had already started them – an impressive group!)

One of the ‘lessons learned’ that I shared with them was that if you are the business owner… then you’re in sales! No exceptions.

February 5, 2025

Seller-Doers: What Are Your Goals for This Year?

No, not your revenue goals… but your personal growth goals?

And not those silly New Year’s resolutions that are almost certainly forgotten by now… but personal goals that will help you develop into a true sales professional. Don’t have them? Well, let me give you a few things to think about…

November 19, 2024

‘Former’ Clients Don’t Have to Be ‘Former’ Forever

When a client leaves you for a competitor, do they come back? In many – if not most – cases, the answer is ‘no.’ But why is that?

For most of us, when we lose a client, our mindset becomes, “Well, it was a good run – time for us to move on.” In some cases, we get busy with other clients and other projects and just forget about them. Occasionally, we get pissed at them, “How dare they? We did good work for them… why are they leaving?” But the fact is, it doesn’t have to be like that.

Gone doesn’t have to mean gone forever. Here’s an example of a client experience that happened to us recently…