Be interested in others so they can be interested in you

The professional services challenge

If you are a management consultant, venture capitalist, lawyer, accountant, IT firm, executive coach or any other service professional, you face the same challenge: How do you balance execution and client acquisition?

And, if you’re good at what you do, you in all likelihood are a better practitioner than salesperson. It’s the love of your craft that got you into the business, not your love for sales.  How are you supposed to build a relationship business with cold-calling techniques?  There has to be a better way!

The initial dead end

We recently worked with an executive coach who was having challenges in scaling his practice. His clients love him, but direct referrals alone couldn’t grow his business quickly enough. › Continue reading

Tags: Productivity Assistant, sales tactics

9 Simple Tactics to Optimize Your CRM

Prialto works closely with sales teams to offload valuable recurring tasks and allow them to better focus on their clients. Our focus on making executive more productive within their current systems has allowed us to see what works universally well across organizations.

When prialto starts working with a new client, we often find that a company’s CRM design itself is a barrier to adoption.   Just like Microsoft Word, CRM systems have incredible functionality, most of which goes unused.  We recommend making a system as simple as possible and putting thought into each field tracked.  Below are a few best practices we have observed through our team’s 100,000+ hours supporting prialto members. › Continue reading

Tags: CRM Optimization, Salesforce

Prialto Tell a Friend

Prialto wants to help your friends be more productive:

Getting to the first million dollars in sales

Unless you are one of the few companies with an inherent viral model, building a sales team takes a lot of work.  We have seen founders and CEOs make two consistent mistakes (in previous careers we were guilty of these ourselves):

• Trying to hire a sales team before you prove your model yourself
• Creating a commission plan before a sales model

As you build your sales team, here are a few simple tips to maximize your chance of success: › Continue reading

Tags: best practices, sales tactics

One phone rule will save us all time

One simple cell phone etiquette rule will save us all many hours.

You will recognize the context:

Say you are driving north down Highway 101 from Palo Alto to San Francisco at about 3:00 PM on Friday afternoon. You dial your friend in New York and reach him as he is heading home to rest before going out to dinner. He’s on the E Train.

You are in the midst of an important discussion. And, then, just before he heads into Brooklyn Heights, he says “If I lose you going under the water, I’ll . . .” You hear silence, and, then, silence. . Gone! Lost connection, and who knows exactly what the last words were your friend heard?

You wait for about how long you know it takes for the E Train to resurface on the other side of the East River. Here, then, is the sequence of events that follow: › Continue reading

Tags: phone management