Inside Sales and Service: Your Frontline to Gaining Competitive Advantage
The Evolving Role of Inside Sales and Customer Service PersonnelWhat role does Inside Sales/Customer Service (IS/CS) play in today’s sales process? How does the company leverage the existing relationships between IS/CS and the customer? The answer to this question plays a key role for upper quartile performers. Upper quartile performers understand the important role played by the inside sales person, customer service and counter personnel. “A Player” field sales reps are not threatened by the fact that the majority of inbound calls are handled by IS/CS personnel because the majority of these calls represent a sales opportunity for the company. Customers who call in do so for the main purpose of fulfilling a need, which often leads to the placement of an order. Customers are very dependent upon inside sales personnel for information, suggestions about products, substitution products, application help and expertise, new product information, new services, delivery information and promotional opportunities for cost savings.Inside sales and customer service personnel have more customer contact than anyone else in the organization. IS/CS people take more than 80% of all orders placed. This means that the IS/CS are in a better position to influence buying behavior than the field sales person. Progressive managers truly understand what that means in regard to market share growth. They know that the consistent use of suggestive selling techniques, up selling and promotions can have a dramatic impact on average order size and increase share of spend in each account. IS/CS personnel traditionally build relationship eq

What is the Secret to Building a $100M Consulting Practice?
Imagine if you were no longer threatened by consulting commoditization and the resulting loss of firm revenues. What if you could leverage technology in a way that would increase your profit margins and open doors of unlimited add-on consulting opportunities?You are painfully aware that service-capability selling by a consulting organization no longer works. Clients are increasingly seeking productized consulting solutions to common business problems.Now absorb this information: Gartner reports that the consulting organizations that will ultimately survive in the future will be those that create standard, repeatable consulting services.What then, is the secret to building a thriving consulting practice in the face of commoditization?1. Do This to Stand Out in a Commoditized Crowd Al Ries, author of The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding observed that most professional service firms are good at generating prospects, but not at branding. The key is not what you do (the commodity) but the way you do it (your brand).Just imagine what would happen if you productized your common business services and then competed on the merits of your brand.2. Do This to Profit From Commoditization You probably already know this, but productizing services with pre-defined project plans not only accelerates project completion but also increases firm profit margins.Think of how many of your current services could be pre-defined and delivered as a solution package. What affect would that have on your profit margins?3. Do This to Move Beyond Commod

Make Money with Affiliate Marketing Part I
It is easy to make money with affiliate marketing if you know how to go about it. Many people have spent their entire internet marketing career selling other peoples products without ever having a product of their own.Affiliate marketing is a way of making money by selling products from which you get a commission on the sale. Affiliate commissions range from just a few percent to as much as 70% or even more, though the commission on electronically deliverable goods tends to be around 50%. You get half of everything you sell.This type of marketing has many advantages, the main one being that you don’t need your own product. Not only that, but an affiliate marketer has an almost unlimited range of products to sell. Among other advantages is the fact that you don’t have to deal with the actual sales process. That is done by the merchant, and you don’t even have to have a sales page. Your job is to send prospects to the merchant’s sales page.Nor do you have to collect any money, or deal with complaints or guarantees. That is all done by the merchant. All you have to do is to send prospects to the merchant’s sales page and collect your commission checks every month. Now 50% is looking like a great deal, isn’t it, especially since you can sell dozens of products at once. There are plenty of sites online that offer large ranges of affiliate products to sell, one of the largest being Clickbank that deals exclusively in electronically deliverable goods such as ebooks and software.