Nepotism Gone Bad

A friend of mine started a very successful business as the exclusive distributor of a special baking ingredient from Europe that he sold to bakeries and manufacturers of snack foods.

He was able to buy a beautiful house and send his kids to private school. However, his business was a sneeze away from going bankrupt. He hired too many brothers, sisters and friends, and put them in key positions. There was no accountability.  Read more... (527 words, 1 image, estimated 2:06 mins reading time)

According to David Benitez, CEO of KPI Online customer Intelligent Mexican Marketing (IMM) his company is not a snack food distribution company. They’re a company that introduces and builds brands in the marketplace, and had to create their own distribution network because none existed for this market category.

The strategy seems to have worked. IMM has grown from only four delivery trucks three years go, to 64 trucks today.

Benitez said that to achieve that level of growth, he had to become an information company. KPI Online was instrumental in helping him achieve this.  Read more... (882 words, estimated 3:32 mins reading time)

Judging from the number of social media consultants that follow me on Twitter, the number of blogs on social media optimization, the number of Social Media Tweetups in my town, and the number of new Social Media software startups, you’d get the impression that Social Media marketing is the answer to every growing company’s prayers, virtually guaranteeing success.

I don’t have to tell you, because it’s been repeated countless of times before, that Social Media is NOT the magic antidote if you don’t have a solid marketing strategy, you don’t know your market, and your product is a dog.  Read more... (830 words, 1 image, estimated 3:19 mins reading time)

How Are Sports and The Corporate World Related?

Ever since my son was 9 years old he diligently collected statistics on players in every major league sport: football players, baseball players, basketball players, and even players from Major League Soccer in the U.S.

By the time he was 11 he was accurately predicting who would be in the Final Four of the NCAA college basketball championships.

We’re crazy about our sports statistics, and can quote them as easily as English majors can quote Shakespeare.  Read more... (402 words, 1 image, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)

Note: this is the last post in the series on how to increase sales.

3 Steps to Increase Sales Now- Average Sale per Customer

In the last couple of posts, we discussed how you can increase sales by examining your data using a dashboard or analytical tool, to become familiar with two key measures:

1. The number of customers you have (current, new, lost), and
2. The frequency with which they purchase.

The third measure, increasing sales per customer, is probably one of the biggest opportunities you have to increase sales.

However, few companies recognize this and focus on it.  Read more... (537 words, 1 image, estimated 2:09 mins reading time)

This is the 2nd blog post in this mini-series.

3 Steps to Increase Sales Now – Purchasing Frequency

In the last post on The Smart Way to Increase Sales, we established that:

1. You don’t necessarily need to implement new sales training or strategies to help your sales people become more effective at selling, and

2. You DO need easy access to analytical dashboards in order to see what the sales data tells you about new customers vs.  current customers, and how you need a good balance of sales between each group to grow revenues.  Read more... (494 words, 1 image, estimated 1:59 mins reading time)

Note: This is the first post in a 3 post series on increasing sales

Not another sales motivational blog post

By now everybody’s heard the term “coffee is for closers,” made famous by Alec Baldwin’s “in-your-face” speech in the movie Glengarry Glenn Ross. Baldwin’s scientific method for motivating the sales guys at this hard-sell investment real estate company? He used pure macho bravado to appeal to their competitive instincts and desire to avoid the humiliation of being fired, or even winning a set of steak knives as the “second prize” in sales.  Read more... (707 words, 1 image, estimated 2:50 mins reading time)

Well, we had a very successful conclusion to our first contest, our iPad giveaway.

We had asked you to tell us: What is the biggest, hairiest spreadsheet report you had to build, and why was it so difficult?

You did so and we received some great stories, which I’ll get into later.

First, here’s the video of the live raffle drawing broadcast we did today in Houston:

You can see on the video what our winner described as his largest spreadsheet reporting headache.

Here are some other  really interesting ones.  Read more... (459 words, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)

This is a guest post co-written by Carlos Lozano of ITS-Dynamics and Fernando Labastida of KPI Online

The Fashion Industry: Innovative by Necessity

The apparel industry is one of the oldest on the planet. The earliest possible sewing needles have been dated to about 40,000 years ago.

But despite its age, it is one of the most technologically advanced non-techie industries today. Why? Everybody’s trying to figure out how to invent a fashion industry crystal ball.  Read more... (957 words, 1 image, estimated 3:50 mins reading time)

Small Businesses are Sick of Spreadsheets

When Lotus 1-2-3 came out on January 26, 1983, it was one of the first spreadsheet’s to become hugely popular because of the great productivity gains businesses obtained from it.

Now spreadsheets have become a staple of everyday business life (with Microsoft Excel as the dominant spreadsheet), but more and more companies are discovering that in order to really see how their business is performing in a timely fashion, spreadsheets are a real pain.

That’s what I’ve been discovering over the last few months as I embarked on a quest to find out, from our customers’ mouths, what was it  that really made them decide to become customers of KPI Online.  Read more... (581 words, 1 image, estimated 2:19 mins reading time)