Optimism Alert: The Opportunity in the Chaos
Apparently, we’re supposed to write about the virus subsiding only to re-emerge worse in a few months and repeat that cycle indefinitely until we are all trading sugar and toilet paper in the alleys of our new barter economy. While not understating the seriousness or importance of our current precautions and challenges, the world is […]
Economic Recovery Sales & Marketing: Originating through the U
Samsung made significant investments into R&D during the steepest part of the financial crisis decline. The result: they moved their brand value from 31st ranked in the world to 6th following the crisis. Amazon made investments in something called ‘Prime Video’ and ‘Fire TV’ in early 2009. The companies that were thinking about opportunity when […]
The “Gorilla” Math Problem of Commercial Finance Growth
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Isn’t it fun to be growing again!?! Leaders in the commercial finance business are positioning themselves to take new ground, expand into new asset classes or markets and grow the sales staff. But be careful Houston, you might have a problem. Throwing people at a growth initiative can get it done. Man it’s expensive though. […]
Vendor Finance Strategy Foundations—Being a rock star asset/industry specialist
Most common American Idol judge feedback: “You really made it your own”. Meaning that they did something lots do and made it very unique. As an industry/asset specialist in the vendor finance business, we think there are some basic items to being a real rock star and across a sea of sameness, me too provider […]
Don’t be just a deal doer. Lead a vendor finance business
It’s great to have a sales team of “deal machines”. But leadership of a vendor finance company is a different thing. It requires you to be bigger, look above the tree in front of you, forecast the direction of the wind and adjust the sails. It requires setting strategy, structure, a view on the competitive […]
Maybe the biggest sales and marketing mistake
Don’t define yourself or your company by what you sell, define it by what you believe? Do you sell asset based lending or believe you are enabling growth through acquisition? Are you selling equipment finance or do you believe that new equipment package will give a customer a chance to profitably win that road construction […]
Is there a crisis of poor sales management?
The final six coaches of March Madness are: John Calipari, Rick Pitino, Tom Izzo, Mike Krzyzewski, Mark Few, Bo Ryan. For those that don’t immediately get it, these guys represent a roll call of 6 of the 10 most successful coaches of the last decade or more, so as much as we talk about players…there’s […]
Commercial Finance Websites: 10 things you just gotta have down
What should a commercial finance website be? You must think it should be a boring piece of online sales collateral that has no chance of helping you do much of anything. And after reviewing hundreds of your websites, we must say if that’s what you’re after…great work. But on the off chance that that is […]
Helping your sales team have better sales conversations.
The new phrase, and one that is likely to stick, is sales enablement. The question is what is your company doing to enable your salesforce to have better, more effective sales conversations? The answer for most commercial finance businesses is…drumroll…nothing. Not that it was ever a great idea, but the days of just hiring salespeople […]
Why targeting the “middle market” can be sales & marketing disaster.
Provocative title, but a not-so-easy topic. Why? Because most of you originating in this space are generalists in a general category of poorly defined businesses. What is middle market? $10-$500MM, $50-$500MM, $100MM-$1B, 100 employees to 1000 employees? The National Center for the Middle Market (our friends at GE and Ohio State) define the space as […]