Last week I went on a little rant against those who tell us that in this Google Age it’s not important to stuff your head with facts. I showed how on having a deep well of knowledge to draw from is so critical for effective thinking.  But what about persuasion? Compared to clear thinking and compelling communication, it would seem that having a lot of facts at your command would seem to be relatively less important. In this article, I’d like to show that depth of knowledge is a huge asset for persuasion as well.

Regular readers know that one of my key themes is that content is king. It’s wonderful to have a gift of gab and to know how to pull all the persuasive strings, but without a lot of facts at your immediate command, you can look like a fine pen that is running out of ink.

Unless you make a living as a writer, most of your persuasion is real time, so you’re not going to have time to look up the information you need to support your point. In a dialogue where two people are trying to influence each other, the one who has the necessary facts at their command when they need them is likeliest to prevail.

Have you ever seen someone deliver a slide presentation and look at the slides most of the time? They use them as a crutch and a memory aid for their “talk track”, and it’s obvious that they don’t have full mastery of the material. Yet, they’re trying to talk you into something based on that material. The content may be airtight, but yet it’s unconvincing; they come across as content mercenaries, fighting for someone else’s ideas.

Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is much more than improving the effectiveness and efficiency of sales and marketing. In fact, RPM is today enabling organizations – from major health systems and global consumer product companies to web 3.0 start-ups – to transform their revenue processes and realize significant increases in performance and results.

But, I would argue that RPM is even bigger than that. We are increasingly seeing marketing automation and RPM on the front lines of creating new ways of thinking about, and ultimately creating, business excellence. RPM is helping companies to drive business-building change in a world that is changing faster than many of us would ever have thought possible just a few short years ago.

So where is that change taking companies now? And how can we harness it to maximize top-line results while improving bottom-line profitability? The answers lie in how RPM is providing a strategic and operational framework with which companies can rethink, enhance, and expand their critical relationships with customers. This is a big idea that is worth exploring.

I have gone quiet on my blog for a while. One of the reasons is that I am preparing and teaching a course on “Methods for Complex Sales” in the Master Program “Strategic Sales Management” at the ESB Business School at Reutlingen University, Germany. Preparing and delivering this six days course is quite an undertaking consuming much of my time not devoted to delivering consulting projects. Over the next few week, I will write about my experiences in preparing and teaching the course. Today, I would like to share my thoughts I had when preparing for the first lesson. It thought it would be good practice in a university class to start with a definition of what sales is.

Oxford Dictionary for the Business World

I started by consulting the Oxford Dictionary for the Business World where I found:

“Sale
1 exchange of a commodity for money etc. act or instance of selling
2 amount sold
3 temporary offering of goods at reduced prices
4a event at which goods are sold
4b public auction

On or for sale: Offered for purchase [Old English]”

I felt that only the first definition would fit with the subject of my course. Yet the “exchange of a commodity...” bothered me immensely. Although we see strong trends toward offerings become commodities ever faster, I could not see how I could my conviction that successful sales people by bringing value to their customers can curb this trend would fit with this definition.

So I tried the entry

What would happen if you were able to double your sales and marketing resources overnight? Assuming that you haven’t already saturated your target market, how confident are you that you could at least double your revenues - and how long would that take? What if you were able to quadruple your resources?

This question often poses a problem for B2B-focused organisations with long and complex sales cycles, or for sales teams that have a long history of relying on sales heroics. Without a well-defined, scalable sales and marketing process, no matter how much resource you can throw at the market, you’ll inevitably struggle to attract, engage, qualify and convert enough of the right sort of prospects.

The challenge is particularly acute for growth-phase organisations that are trying to “cross the chasm” from early adopters to mainstream markets, and for established organisations that are wrestling with increasingly competitive markets. It’s hard - some would say impossible, in today’s business climate - to break free of these constraints unless you have managed to establish a truly scalable, repeatable and reliable sales and marketing machine - a machine that is continually improving its return on the resources already being deployed.