I'm not sure. It depends on your company's culture and objectives. Check it for yourself...
| This stuff is for you if... | This stuff is NOT for you if... |
|---|---|
| You're strategically growing your firm based on your vision and by adhering to a code of ethics based on your values. | You're tactically chasing opportunities, and anyone with a pulse beat and a wallet is a good enough client, thus must be hunted down and turned into an invoice number. |
| Your sales strategy is to have prospects seek you out for your unique expertise, and you accept only those prospects as clients who fulfil your "Ideal Client" criteria. | Your sales strategy revolves around hiring more salespeople and whipping them harder to dial faster for dollars and knock on more doors to meet your quota. |
| Your success is about the interaction between human beings based on mutual trust, respect and peer-level candour. | Your success is about flogging anything floggable to any sucker who money can be sucked away from. |
| You're ready, willing to make a fair investment of time, effort and money to develop and implement a business development system that will deliver lasting results. | You're in search of a miracle, a silver bullet, a cheap and easy solution in search of the quick buck. |
| You want to gain a slight edge over the competition by selling through salespeople your market regards as respected experts. | Your salespeople are aggressive, glib, smooth-talking order-takers, and you want to keep them that way. |
| You want to develop and implement a fully integrated custom-made business development system operated by a small crack team of professionals. | You have no idea why the marketing and sales folks should work as a team, and don't mind managing an army-sized sales force and struggling with the endless "hiring -> training -> motivating -> disciplining -> firing -> hiring" cycle. |
| You operate a well-oiled business development department where people of different areas fully support each other. | Your sales and marketing folks are in constant battle with each other and you couldn't care less. |
| You sell complex, high-ticket technology solutions business to business, involving multiple meetings, decisions and decision-makers. | Your marketing is about your image, glitz, veneer, glamour, colourful logos, fancy slogans and other "awareness-raising" bullshit and you're perfectly happy with it. |
| You want to build an IT company which great clients want to do business with and top-notch talents want to invest their careers in. | You believe that the marketing department should consist of a graphics artist producing cute images and a minimum-wage kid cold-calling the Yellow Pages over and over again. |
| You believe in selling through transparency. You carefully select your clients and play with open cards. | You believe that "selling" is a transaction in a number's game: "Give me your money! Here is your stuff! Get lost! Repeat process." |
| You rule your "fun and discipline" business with a relaxed rein but through specific values and tough disciplines which attracts the right people and repel the rest. | You rule your "Bring them in -> burn them out -> kick them out" type business with an iron hand, and you don't mind the high staff turnover and the bad reputation it creates. |
| Your business grows for profit. Indicator: Profit per employee. | Your business suffers from cancer: Growth for the sake of growth. Indicator: Company size and gross sales. |
| You want to eliminate every shred of internal competition. | You don't mind having your people at each other's throats to kep them on their feet. |
| Compensations are based on company-wide performance to eliminate internal competition. | Compensations are based on individual performance to encourage internal competition and let the cream rise to the top. |
| You use CRM, ERP and other technology stuff to improve collaboration between your people and clients. | You use CRM, ERP and other technology stuff to assert more control, police and micromanage your staff. |
| You are constantly looking for better ways of marketing and selling your stuff. | You're not interested in getting bigger bang for your buck and fully satisfied with the status quo. |
| You want to hire the best and keep them for a very very long time. | You want to hire people at the lowest possible cost and then replace them with people who cost even less. |
| When hiring, you're looking for people who can offer great value to your company. | When hiring, you're looking for people who cost as little as possible to hire. |
| You're willing to try new apporaches to achieve better results. | You do what you've always done but do it harder and longer with more people. |
| You are or aspire to be a premium-priced organisation. | You are happy to be a "budget alternative" and stumble through life from one competitive bid to the next. |
If you try to build your organisation based on what's in the left-hand side column, then this website is probably helpful to you.
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