24. April 2010 by admin.

The fear of every corporate executive is when sensitive, private company information is compromised. You hear about these stories every couple of weeks.

It’s one thing to have your company’s information compromised from the outside, or to have an insider help to hijack your sensitive information. It’s an entirely different “thing” to have your information lost due to stupidity.

How easy is it to lose your sensitive data? It’s as easy as misplacing it!

Today with the use of portable USB Flash Memory your company’s sensitive data is probably spread out on 1000s of these devices being carried around by 100s of your company’s employees.

You get the picture, everyone has about 2 or 3 different USB flash memory devices in their possession and they often mix work, school, and their own personal information on EACH device.

Now that we know you have the picture in your mind (or to say it another way you KNOW you have a data problem) what are you going to do about it?

Here are 8 simple rules you need to implement concerning these devices this Monday morning.

1. Ask your USB Flash Memory supplier to imprint your logo on every device.
2. Have your supplier “serialize” every unit and set up a process internally to record which employee is responsible for which device.
3. Have your supplier password protect each device. Don’t just password protect a portion of the drive by partitioning it, protect the entire drive. If you don’t do this your employees will use the unprotected portion - every time.
4. For “super secret” information have your supplier implement a data encryption service on the drive.
5. Outlaw with immediate disciplinary action all non-company memory devices.
6. Create a data destruction action plan just like you have for your sensitive paper documents that you are currently shredding through an outside vendor.
7.  Put your data plan in writing, train your employees on the plan, and have them literally sign off on the plan.
8. ENFORCE YOUR DATA PLAN!

If you are looking for a company for the custom logo imprint, serialization, password protection, and encryption my advice is to look at JDP Digital, Inc. They have been  doing this type of work since 2001 for the USB Flash Memory community.

David Peterson - President: Atlanta Sales and Consulting.

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3. November 2009 by admin.

Can you have a worse day? You get just about through your entire day and here comes trouble walking into your office. One sales representative can’t get along with a coworker. They are actually arguing today. Somedays they just ignore each other. Other days they spread their karma throughout the entire call center.

Sales reps who are not involved feel uncomfortable. As a sales manager you have to do something. If you let it fester I guarantee it will get worse and you will get more involved.

Here are the minimum steps that you will need to take with all of the workers involved:

1. Identify the problem as seen from both sides. Make sure you understand the complete issue.
2. Document the problem to be used for this corrective action and the EOY evaluations.
3. Make a judgement call on who is causing the problem. In a lot of cases both employees are the problem.
4. This is a working environment bring both employees together to allow them to speak with each other in private while you moderate. This will be the last discussion on this issue.
5. Disciplinary action. Some form of formal discipline must take place for both employees.
6. If it continues terminate the employees.

Did he really write terminate the employees? Yes I did… When your employees work in an office environment you cannot have two or more employees effecting the entire sales floor.

Regardless of the issue: Office romance gone bad, sales reps accused of stealing sales, just a spat over the smell of cologne - you name it I have heard and seen it all. Regardless of the issue if in the end the two sales representatives cannot work together it will spill onto your entire sales floor.

Once it spills onto the sales floor your productivity just tanked. The easy fix for all of this is to hire professional sales people. Professionals may not like the person next to them but they can always work with them.

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2. November 2009 by admin.

When sales for individual representatives are down I tend to look directly at their specific efforts. A lot of times what you will find is that the sales rep is so busy they have papers flying and desks so cluttered that you may find yesterday’s left over lunch if you look hard enough.

Determining by looking at effort alone at what is up (since sales sales are down) can be a bit challenging.

Many times it is not the sales representatives efforts that should be in question. The question should be what are those efforts accomplishing? I used to have an old sales manager that said just about every hour “…what are doing right now to get the check?”

In other words what are you doing right now to produce sales? If you let them sales reps will work themselves to death on things that really don’t need to be worked. They will take on every project, every training, and every meeting that arises. But at the end of the day they are hired to sell - thus the name, sales representative.

This is a management problem not a sales rep issue. If sales are down for one or more of your representatives take a look the activities being generated by their efforts. Are they actually sales related?

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