Sell More Faster

Foreword

From 2005 to 2008, I worked for Amos at Business.com, leading sales teams that sold online advertising. I started with the company in 2001 as an individual contributor when there were just three salespeople and in 2002 was promoted to director and took over the Inside Sales team. My boss gave me quite a bit of latitude, but this was my first real sales management role. I used my best judgment to lead sales, but I didn't really know what a “sales strategy” was (and I didn't know that I didn't know). Still, I brought much-needed metrics—orientation, organization, and process—to the team and scaled it out to over 30 sales reps

That said, it could have been better. We really didn't have a good lead generation strategy because we really didn't know who our high probability targets were or even what our Ideal Customer Profile was. We didn't have a good understanding of how we made money and where we should be selling ads on our site for the most incremental revenue.

Prior to Amos taking over sales and client services, the salespeople could just call on anybody they “felt” would be a good fit for our online advertising products (cost-per-click advertisers, or CPC). For example, it was very easy for a salesperson to go to Overture (formerly goto.com and acquired by Yahoo!) and type in high-value keywords like “web conferencing” or “web hosting” and call on advertisers buying those keywords. It felt like shooting fish in a barrel. But looking at the big picture, we learned that ...