Last week we posted on the fiasco involving a leaker on the HP board of directors in HP’s Internal Fireworks.

In spite of her claims of support, chairwoman Patricia Dunn announced today that she will relinquish her chair position but remain on the board of directors.

This scandal is going to blow up further as it should. “Pretexting” board members personal phones is beyond pathetic. I am surprised that she is allowed to retain her director position. Once the feds take a look into this fiasco, the other shoe may fall on that topic.

What a cultural mess it must be inside of HP right now.

Comments(0)

I always seem to get drawn into articles with lots of stats in them. I came across 2 short, but interesting articles in last week’s newsletter from Workforce Management.

The first article was from a survey conducted by human resources firm Adecco North America. In the article, they cite increased stress stemming from putting in longer hours at work. It finds that about 29% of employees report logging longer hours than they did a year ago, with a reported 32% experiencing on-the-job stress.

The second article was from Kronos Inc. and Harris Interactive. Their joint survey that employees who are satisfied with their employer are more apt to extend themselves beyond the call of duty. The survey found that a whopping 82% of satisfied workers say they would be willing to do so.

Couple of interesting points of information. It makes one wonder how many workers are truly satisfied where they are today?

Comments(0)

Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power released an editorial titled Should You Outsource Your Sales Force? He starts right off with a statistic I have not heard:

A few years ago, outsourcing a sales force was a novelty. Today it has become a trend that enjoys a 20% annual growth rate.

I’ve always been a skeptic of this approach mainly due to my sales background. I cannot wrap my simple mind around the idea of a person from another company owning the relationship with the customer. Leveraging a better ROI is one thing, placing a degree of separation from your customer (read: revenue) base seems like Russian roulette. What if you become dissatisfied with the outsourcing company’s performance? If they own the customer relationship, you are jeopardizing your company’s vitality.

Some of those concerns are explained in a quote from the editorial:

Says Polson, “We have perfected the art of the one-call close.”

One-call closes screams of a dinosaur approach to me. The person who is quoted was referring to their outsourcing activities for an office supply store so perhaps it is appropriate. Whenever I hear that phrase, I immediately think of a web store. If you really want to lower your customer acquisition costs and you are in the proverbial one-call close business, why not move to a web-based model? The money invested in salespeople and/or outsourced sales could be redirected towards marketing and website development.

Our customer base is primarily composed of relationship sales models. We have a couple of customers who have typical sales cycles of over 12 months. Outsourcing sales may be an option for a lightning fast sales cycle, but I am skeptical of a relationship sales model excelling in an outsourced sales program.

That being said, I do have to close with this impressive statistic from the article that flies in the face of my previous paragraph:

Fusion Sales Partners closed half a billion dollars worth of business for one Fortune 500 client during the past 12 months.

Maybe I am the dinosaur?

Comments(0)