Posts by Mike Crandall, Sandler Custom Growth Solutions

I came to Levant Technologies in 2011 as the fourth ever employee. As soon as I arrived, I implemented tracking. Everything to me is about tracking. It’s paramount to write down your goals and know where you’re going. If you’re not tracking every single step along the way, then how do you know if you ever got there?

After years of working with businesses of all sizes to implement customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, I’ve realized successful implementation begins with understanding how the end-user wants to interface with application.

I visit with business owners everyday who approach me asking how they should implement a CRM platform. But before they ask, “How?” they really need to be asking “Why?” In other words, why use a CRM? What problem would a CRM solve for their organization?

Why would a client choose you over the competition? What makes your brand special? What’s your company’s unique selling proposition? Six years into Evolve Research, our company still hadn’t really defined who we were and what made us different. We are a research company and we do really, really good work. But, there are other research companies out there who do good work as well.

As business owners and sales professionals, boundaries from work might be a foreign concept. What’s a work life balance, really? We’ve always been told if we work hard, we’ll be successful. So, why stop working?

A lot has changed when it comes to sales and scaling your business, especially since I started selling back in 1994. Here are three tips on setting your business up for success by making it scalable.

You may have heard a lot of thoughts on what makes a successful salesperson. I really got into selling in about 1994, and I still remember the quote from Zig Ziglar that still guides all my core values when it comes to selling…

After we developed a proprietary drilling system to dig 150 feet, World Vision approached us and proposed a pilot project of 7,000 wells. That sounded great, but they asked us to fund it! A project of that size would require 1.2 million feet of pipe at the cost of $20 million. At the time, we had a staff 6, two of which were volunteers and our annual budget was $300,000.

In the developing world there are a billion people who don’t have access to water. A child dies every 22 seconds of starvation, malnutrition and thirst. Each day, 5,000 children die because they do not have access to clean drinking water. Furthering the problem, well-drilling rigs can’t get into these remote areas and even if they could, it would cost the village $10,000 to 15,000 to drill just one well.

If you’re a Thunder season ticket member, you might get asked questions from your account manager about how many dogs you have, how old your children are and when your wedding anniversary is.