Do you choose to work from home? On the road? Or are you perhaps an employee of Yahoo!, obliged to head into the workplace to carry out your duties? There are all manner of reasons which might account for the huge increase in people that are working from home, whether out of choice or necessity. A couple of influencing factors include:

• Working on a consultancy or project basis rather than long-term contract
   
• Reducing the need or desire to commute
   
• Work irregular hours, evenings or weekends when office buildings may be closed
   
• Having a small businesses saving money on office premises
   
• Online

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This article looks at the need to be able to see WHY your customers are buying as much as the What, How and When.

Standards in data capture are shifting. The traditional challenge has been to offer the ability to crunch numbers – volume of sales, leads converted, opportunity value for the current quarter and so on. This is not only valuable but essential information that relates to the performance of your organisation and individuals within. With this quantitative data, we can answer all those “What…” and “How Many” questions.

However using today’s possibilities to capture

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I am already reading articles proclaiming the death of social media. No, seriously I really am! OK, so once we have got over the attention-grabbing headline, we can start to look at what the author is actually trying to tell us. It seems that figures for Facebook usage (in certain countries) amongst teenagers has levelled off, if not actually dropped. The dramatists can look at this figure in any number of ways and read different reasons into it such as:

• Teenagers don’t want to be on the same platform as their parents.
   
• They would rather be active on a variety of different apps and

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When the water of a river stops moving it stagnates and not only will a foul smell start to rise from the murky depths but its life and soul will die off. Just like a river, your sales funnel needs to keep flowing. It won’t suffice if you just pump your CRM software full of leads as this data will remain lifeless if nothing is done with it eventually clogging up your system with redundant records.

Once the leads are in place, one of the first steps is to qualify and segment them. Some leads might be easy wins and can be fished straight out and into your prospects and opportunities. Others

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Traditionally the close of a sale might have been seen as the end of the sales journey; today it is often seen as one of the very early stages of the journey if not quite the beginning. Parallel to this shift in the typical customer relationship, sales marketing orientation techniques have been replaced by various models over the past decades and for many of you, relationship marketing is where you are right now.

I’m sure lots of you subscribe to the theory that the cost of customer retention is considerably cheaper than the cost of acquisition. Following the various steps on the lead

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