About George W. Krajewski Jr.

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"George arrived with a plan of action and immediately began

implementing it. The results were quick to follow. Within a

short time I watched him completely transform the sales department. What followed was a 60% year over year increase... If you are looking for a results oriented sales executive I highly recommend George Krajewski."         read more                                                                                        

 

Jim Pinder, MBA, CFRE Former Vice President of Operations

                                                     Lifestyle Center of America      

 

 

 

 

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Let Me Unlock The Potential of Your Sales Organization

According to legendary quality expert W. Edwards Deming, if you want to optimize results there is one key element you cannot do without.

It doesn’t matter how talented, educated, or experienced your salespeople are are, or how hard they work at it, there remains a very large gap between the actual results they will produce and the results they could be producing had someone been paying attention to this one thing.

In today’s ultra competitive business environment, where the margin between winning and losing is so slight, I am surprised at how many companies continue to ignore the one area that holds the biggest potential for drastic increases in productivity and bottom line results in the shortest time possible.

 

The Golden Key: Sales Process Management

 

Most companies overlook this critical element entirely, focusing   instead on individuals and performance issues while the real problem goes unaddressed. What is this key element? It's your sales process.

 

It's not enough to simply have a selling process. Every company has one whether by design or default. To optimize, you must constantly appreciate, manage, and improve it. According to Deming, the job of management is to continuously improve the system. Make no mistake, if your business needs to generate revenue now, you can't afford to neglect your sales process for even one more day. 

My sales and marketing plan will...

Increase Your Sales Immediately

Generate a Consistent Revenue Stream Fast

Identify the Things That Are Holding Back Your Sales and Fix Them

Recover Sales You Didn't Know You Were Losing

Eliminate Missed Opportunities

Reduce Your Cost of Sales

Duplicate Best Practices Across Your Entire Sales Organization

Create a Reliable, Measurable System of Metrics

Automate CRM Tools that Drive Successful Sales Behaviors

 

The High Cost of Missed Opportunities

 

You may find this hard to believe but there are “holes” in your current selling process. Don’t worry though; even the best sales organizations are not immune to this reality. In fact, I’ve yet to see a company that doesn’t have any. It just means that your salespeople are not operating at their peak potential. No big deal right? Wrong. Your people are losing sales they could be winning if someone was paying full time attention to process.

 

Unfortunately, it's hard to stop the bleeding when you can't find the cut—or worse yet—when you don’t even know there’s a cut. Most companies don’t know where to start in trying to find and identify the weaknesses and bottlenecks in their sales process that are holding their people back. Do you? Most companies don’t even know where to start. In that sense, it’s easier to manage people than to engineer process improvement. That's because it’s always easier to treat the symptom than to actually diagnose and treat the underlying cause of the problem. The result is a selling environment where the true reasons for most failures and revenue shortfalls go unnoticed and, as a result, unaddressed. After all, the only behaviors and habits you can't change are the ones you can't see.

 

On the other hand, what kind of system do you have in place to insure that the best practices in your selling process are likewise being identified and duplicated across your entire organization? Just a few missed opportunities a day multiplied across your total sales force over a year’s time can represent significant, if not devastating, losses. Of course, like those paper cuts, this is hard to quantify because most missed opportunity goes unnoticed and, as such, does not lend itself to easy measurement. Unfortunately, if it cannot be identified and measured it cannot be fixed.

 

Do You Know Where Your Sales Come From?

 

When sales are down, most managers fall back on what's easiest and most familiar to them. For the most part that means they are reduced to becoming high-priced cheerleaders, hoping the salespeople can turn things around with some positive attitude and encouragement. When that doesn't work, the same salespeople who were regarded so highly when sales were up, become scapegoats for a broken sales process. Because your sales managers have no idea which specific actions and behaviors lead to success, and advances within the overall process, they don't know where to look or what to do to fix things. What you're left with is something I call management by anecdote. That is, you're left with stories from your salespeople regarding individual prospects and situations and why those sales never materialized.

 

Companies who operate this way often find themselves grappling with the same basic problems year after year with the only change being the people doing the grappling. Let's face it, it's always going to be easier to blame your people than it is to help them succeed by taking control of a broken process and managing it for maximum return. It’s an ineffective and expensive proposition that leads to the added cost of turnover, recruiting, hiring, and training new people, and inevitably repeating the process over and over. This is how most companies lose revenue and market share.

 

I Will Maximize Your ROI With Sales Process Management  

 

First, we'll break down your sales process into its component pieces. Then we'll  analyze them in terms of efficiency, cost, and effectiveness. Doing this will help us gain an understanding of the real reasons your people close sales, and the reason they lose sales. It will uncover the strengths and weaknesses within your system so we can emphasize, teach, and coach those behaviors that produce successful outcomes and duplicate them across your entire sales team while, at the same time, eliminating or minimizing the things that aren't working.

 

Once we’ve identified the strengths and weakness in your process, the next step is to measure them so that we can establish a system of metrics that will serve as a benchmark for future growth as we implement continuous process improvements. These standards will be valuable in helping to insure consistent performance today while empowering new growth tomorrow. Sales Process Management is a never-ending cycle of improvement that will lead to incredible increases in productivity, sales, and revenue, while substantially lowering your cost of sales.

 

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  My Proven Sales & Marketing Plan

 

 

 

Objective: To Create a Consistent Revenue Stream, Drive Growth and Sustain Profitability.

30% Plus First Year Sales Increase with a Corresponding Zero Percent Increase in Cost. 

 

 

  Here's How We'll Get There...

 

 

 

 1. Identify, measure, and improve your current selling process

 

 

 

First, we'll break down your sales process into its component pieces. Then we'll  analyze them in terms of efficiency, cost, and effectiveness. Doing this will help us gain an understanding of the real reasons your people close sales, and the reason they lose sales. It will uncover the strengths and weaknesses within your system so you can emphasize the things produce successful outcomes and duplicate them across your entire sales team while, at the same time, eliminating the things that aren't working.

 

Once we’ve identified the strengths and weakness in your process, the next step is to measure them so that we can establish a system of metrics that will serve as a benchmark for future growth as we implement continuous process improvements. These standards will be valuable in helping to insure consistent performance today while empowering new growth tomorrow. Sales Process Management is a never-ending cycle of improvement that will lead to incredible increases in productivity, sales, and revenue, while substantially lowering costs.

 

Establishing a reliable system of metrics is not micro management. When we talk about the benefits of such a system, we’re simply talking about the advantages of identifying the numbers and averages that correspond to each piece of your selling process and understanding how they all work together to produce a consistent (successful) outcome. The creation of a reliable, consistent system of metrics will allow you to operate your business at peak efficiency and realize a level of profitability you may never had thought possible.

 

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“George has the ability to make those that work with him better. He is a positive influence on our sales people and works to find ways to constantly improve sales performance, products, and customer service. I am delighted to recommend George Krajewski to you as someone who can be relied upon to deliver exceptional performance within any sales organization.”   read more

 

                                                       ―Paul Henry, Regional Sales Manager, Monster.com

 

 

 2. Drive Successful Sales Behaviors Through Ongoing Coaching & Training

 

 

Every company invests time, energy, and money in training their sales people. Yet as a sales trainer I can tell you there is something missing in conventional sales training programs. As a sales trainer and presenter, I have seen first hand the minimal impact that traditional sales training has in actual practice. Actually, if the key to learning is practice or repetition, then it is easy to see why traditional sales training doesn’t really work as well as it could. You’ve probably sat in on tremendous presentations that left everyone pumped and motivated. You’ve no doubt been involved with sales training that exposed salespeople to some incredible tools and practical information that could really help them in the field. But how much of it is truly assimilated and then used to produce a measurable difference in results across an entire group?

 

My experience has been that most salespeople “learn” very few new sales behaviors they will actually use this way. They may take a few notes and intend to put some of the things they learned into practice but then they get back to their normal schedule and soon they’re not really using much of anything they learned. I’ve returned to teach the same sales training classes, sometimes several years in a row and am always embarrassed by how few of the salespeople remember or use any of the things they “learned” in previous sessions. The truth is they really didn’t “learn” them at all. Human beings learn by doing. Not by sitting in a classroom. And even more than by doing, we truly learn by doing a thing repeatedly. There is an ancient Roman proverb that states “repetitio est mater studiorum,” or “repetition is the mother of learning.” For training to be truly effective in must be practiced consistently. This kind of repetitive training is what your managers and salespeople need if you are going to increase sales and revenue by 30% or more per year. 

 

It is also exactly the kind of training I can provide for you. Once we understand the key behaviors and drivers that lead to successful sales conversions we can begin coaching those behaviors into your people. I like to think of it as Sales Performance Coaching because, unlike conventional training where the focus is on the delivery or presentation of the material, the emphasis we’re after is on reinforcing the behavior or skill on a consistent basis after it has been presented.

 

Top performing professional athletes always have coaching help from someone whose job it is to pay close attention to the little things they may or may not be doing that could potentially add or subtract (even a small percentage) from the effectiveness of their overall performance. When the competition is so close in terms of talent it is often these little things that mean the difference between winning and losing. It’s the same in sales. If you want to get the absolute most out of your people on every sales opportunity you must entrench this kind of “coaching” system into your sales organization.

 

Unfortunately, most sales managers don’t have much practice doing this. I will teach them to "coach" their salespeople for peak performance. They will learn how to introduce a new sales behavior each month and coach their people to practice it through repetition in the field or on the phone until they have demonstrated that they truly own it. At that point they will introduce a new behavior or skill and the process of learning and practice will continue. I can tell you with absolute certainty that if we train your people in this manner it will produce a quantum leap forward in the results they produce.

 

This, too, will be integrated into your selling process where it can be continuously monitored, measured, and improved. Your sales managers must become good at this if you are going to drive sales to levels that fuel extraordinary growth. As your Sales and Marketing Director I will personally train and consistently coach the necessary skills and behaviors into your sales managers and salespeople so they can approach their peak performance levels more often and maximize their full potential.

 

“I have spent my life in the field of human development, teaching and training some of the most respected multi-national corporations on the planet. I have seen many speakers and many trainers during that time. George Krajewski is one of the most authentic and impactful I have ever met. His life's experiences and the skills he has applied in his own highly successful sales career make his message relevant, timely, and valuable to anyone looking to increase sales performance and results."  read more                     

                                                                                                    ―Dr. Dennis Deaton, Founder and President,

                                                                                                                           Quma Learning Systems

 

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   3. Innovative Marketing Tools: Increase Revenue by Communicating Unique Value

 

 

There are really only three ways I know of to increase sales and revenue. They are...

 

#1. Get more new customers.

#2. Increase your average order size.

#3. Increase the frequency that your current customers buy from you (repeat sales).

Many of the process improvements I’ve introduced already will fuel growth by allowing your people to become more efficient, close at a higher percentage, etc. In other words—get more new customers.

 

But we would be negligent if we did not also pay attention to increasing the size and frequency of your sales. The best way to accomplish that objective is to identify or create unique value in the eyes of your prospects and customers. If you don't you run the very real risk of having the market perceive your business as being essentially the same as any other within your category. Once your service is perceived as a commodity in the eyes of your prospective customers the major factor in making a purchase decision, by default, becomes price. By not actively challenging that perception within your market, you unknowingly encourage your salespeople to become lazy and conditioned to relying on price to close business as opposed to communicating and selling your unique value.

 

This commoditization of the marketplace does more to erode profitability than any other single thing I know of. That’s because in order to remain competitive, many companies yield to the temptation to cut prices and demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice profit in order to make the sale. Unfortunately by doing this you unwittingly teach your prospects and customers to ask for, and expect discounts during the selling process.

 

If you are going to convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers you must gain their recognition and acknowledgement of the value they are receiving. If you don’t they’re probably not going to buy, and, if they do, you’ll be dealing with a customer focused almost exclusively on price. Without a process that enables your prospect to recognize and acknowledge the value they are receiving you will be very limited as to what you can successfully sell your service for. The good news is that because there is room to improve the perceived value of your service there is also room for you to increase your overall number of sales, your average order size, and your share of customer wallet. I can help you increase the perceived value of the services you offer and teach your salespeople how to sell it instead of selling on price. By focusing on enhancing your customer’s perceived value you will notice an immediate and significant additional revenue stream. There are two reasons for this. First, your salespeople will be able to close more sales without resorting to discounting. Second, you will realize additional sales through up-selling value added services to people who now recognize and are willing to pay for that increased value. 

 

 

Is there a really good reason your prospects should buy from you

instead of your competitors?

 

 

As your Sales and Marketing Director I will identify or create your own unique value proposition and incorporate it into all of your marketing and sales efforts. That means less money left on the table, larger average ticket, and a greater share of customer wallet.

 

A second major area for creating additional revenue is your current customer base. Like with applying “best practices,” many business people give lip service to mining their customer list while few actually do it consistently. Practice building perceived value and offering value added products and services to current customers via... 

 

Consistent E-mail Marketing

 

You may be doing some of this already through a regular or monthly newsletter. If so, keep it up and try to refine your message so you are clearly demonstrating value with every issue. Then remember to ask your customers to acknowledge that value. Never assume they recognize it. Don’t ever use the newsletter to solicit. Leave that for follow-up e-mailings and direct response sales letters.

 

Frequent Telephone Contact

 

Regular telephone contact with your customers is vital to making sure they recognize and acknowledge the value they are receiving from you. Renewing your annual customer contracts begins the day they make their initial purchase not the day their service is up for renewal. It’s too late then. Your sales or customer service people must be calling on your customers regularly to find out how they (the customer) perceive the value of what they are receiving. Now when renewal time comes you will have been reinforcing that value and asking for acknowledgement of it directly from your customer all year long. Consistent follow-up is the best way to maximize your your repeat and renewal business.

 

 

Regular Direct Mail Contact

 

A twice per year sales letter offering some special customer only perks (attached to an opportunity for up-selling) along with quarterly post card mailings that make no overt sales pitch are excellent tools for creating customer loyalty and repeat sales of value adds. I will create and manage consistent marketing communication to your current customer base with custom designed sales letters and post cards. I will draft and implement an effective strategy that will give your business the competitive edge in the local area, across the state, country, or around the world. That means, more leads, more opportunities, and more sales.

 

A Continuous Public Relations Effort

 

Successful businesses know how to get the word out without spending any of their own precious working capital. Consistent PR will help your business grow and get you the extra exposure that is often the difference between profit and loss.

 

Writing and distributing articles to trade journals and online article directories is a great way for you to become known and trusted as an expert in your field. 

 

As your Sales and Marketing Director I will feed newsworthy information to all of the available media outlets in your market (including Internet) on a monthly basis using both press releases and article submission.

 

“George created a well timed sales letter campaign to allow us to better follow up and close sales that would normally be lost. The result has been more sales and a shorter sales cycle.” read more

 

                                                                                                               ―Craig Sullivan, Sales, Lifestyle Center of America

 

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    4. Increase Market Share by Taking Advantage of the Trend Away From Traditional Advertising

 

 

Print advertising has long been a key driver for success for most small businesses. But as the Internet continues to change the world and newspaper and yellow pages readership continues to shrink, businesses that want to remain competitive recognize they must master the new online media channels or be left behind.

 

How well is your business handling the Internet information explosion?

 

"Some of the most fascinating statistics I saw last year involved the dramatic decline of the use of yellow pages to find local products and services and the move to search engines to find the same information."

Dennis Kennedy, LLRX.com Seven Legal Technology Trends  February 12, 2007 

"The Google Trends graph for searches for “yellow pages” is likely representative of a broad behavioral pattern of Internet users who are going to traditional Yellow Pages sites less and less. If we project the pattern out in time, we can see that searches for “yellow pages” might reduce down to nil by as soon as 2011."

                                                     Chris Smith  Google Trends: Yellow Pages Will Be Toast In Four Years  September 24, 2007

 

With traditional advertising mediums quickly losing market share and more people going online than ever before, you can no longer afford to ignore the Internet and expect to remain competitive.

 

But it's not enough to simply have a website. The Internet is a big place and people still need to be able to find you. To be successful, your Internet strategy must recognize where the people are and put you in front of them.

 
Web Optimization
 

Part of the my strategy for you includes leveraging the growing number of people using search engines to look for a small businesses at every level... including your local area. I will help you optimize your search engine results and make your website, and by extension, your company stand out from the rest. While I can't guarantee a #1 ranking on every keyword, I can deliver a lot of additional traffic to your website. Once we get them there, we will either convert them to paying customers immediately or capture their information and convert them to customers down the road with a consistent marketing effort.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very expensive and it's tricky because the Internet is never static. That's why the money you invested in successful SEO today may very well need to be reinvested again tomorrow. In my experience, companies that fail to pay attention to their SEO strategy by constantly adding and updating content, exploring and monitoring traffic trends, partnerships, and external linking opportunities, as well as measuring their own online marketing presence and testing new ads, tags, and keyword combinations, face the grim prospect of watching their market share gradually erode. As the Internet evolves to catch up with service oriented companies on the local level, the firms that are paying close attention to their Internet strategies will dominate their local markets. The rest will get only the scraps.

 

That's why it pays to have someone on staff who understands the process and can continually monitor results and adapt your strategy to address the changing needs of the online demographic. As your Sales and Marketing Director I will do this for you. In fact, I can deliver more than your share of the local online market and make sure it is your competitors who get the scraps.

 

                                                       Internet Usage

year

% use

Internet Search Engines like Yahoo, MSN, and Google now account for about 90% of all searches done online.

2000

49%

2003

57%

2005

66%

2007

75%

                                                                          Source: Neilsen/Net Ratings

 

"Want to know where to invest your online marketing dollars in 2007? Aim for higher rankings in the top search engines. Sixty-two percent of searchers click on a link within the first page of results, according to a report from iProspect and Jupiter Research... To guarantee you'll turn up in the top search results, invest in a paid search campaign. Local search campaigns are often the most affordable and will bring traffic from your immediate market..."

                                                                                                                 ―Kim T. Gordon  10 Marketing Trends To watch For In 2007  11/10/06

"People do what is easy. Access to the Internet via work, home or any library have truly made getting online easy. According to Jupiter Media, over 64% of people who are looking for information online, use search engines (note: this article is from 2004--the number of people using Internet search engines to find businesses onlineincluding yoursis now about 90% according to Jupiter Research). If I can type my problem or what I want into a search engine and find what I need, I don't need to go through the 100 pages of ads in the yellow pages. Search engines are getting more precise down to an industry specialty and geographic focus, while continuing to be easier to use."

                           ―Phil Reifenberg  Search vs. Yellow Pages: 4 Reasons Why Search Engines Beat Yellow Pages in Local Advertising  7/2004

With people using search engines by a 9-1 margin over yellow pages directories, shouldn't capturing your share of this high-growth segment of a rapidly emerging market be the primary focus of your Internet Strategy?

 
 

Mastering the Social Media Explosion

 

Another Internet phenomenon that is sweeping the marketing world and changing the way companies reach consumers is the sudden proliferation of social networking. Websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are dramatically shifting the business environment creating opportunities for sharing ideas and information as well as for generating sales leads and new customers.

 

Social networking sites connect people and segment them into categories and groups according to various demographics including geography, age, interests, purchasing habits, homeownership etc. If you truly plan to leverage your marketing for all it's worth, part of your internet strategy must include linking all of your Internet marketing through the major social networking sites.

 

The downside is that most small businesses don't know how to use social networking to generate competitive advantage. Even those who do know how find managing this medium to be a very daunting task. In addition to being extremely time consuming, it's difficult to continually generate new content for blogs and keep up with updates to the many social networking sites you'll want to use.

 

As your Sales and Marketing Director I will help you create, maintain, and manage an effective online social network on all of the major social media sites. Together we'll draft and implement an effective strategy that will give your business the competitive edge in your market and your service area. That means, more leads, more opportunities, and more sales!

 

“His unbelievable motivation and personal commitment to succeed were the key drivers to his success. Quarter over quarterGeorge would always produce; and produce BIG! It is with absolute conviction that I would recommend George Krajewski.”      read more                               

                                                                                                             ―Kevin R. Jones, Regional Sales Manager, Monster.com

 

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   5. A Proven Profile for Finding, Developing, and Retaining Top Level Salespeople

 

 

One hundred years ago a company's most valuable assets were generally acknowledged to be it's machinery, it's equipment, or perhaps it's trade secrets. Today a company's most valuable assets walk out the door everyday at five o'clock. That's why finding, acquiring, and retaining the best people is critical to the continued growth and success of every business.

 

Building sales teams for my outsourcing clients these last six years has given me a real appreciation for just how important it is to hitting your strategic revenue goals that you understand and employ a solid recruiting and development program for your salespeople. It's almost impossible to put a dollar figure on what it actually costs to hire the wrong salesperson. Never mind the costs of recruiting, hiring, and training. The cost in terms of missed opportunities, missed sales, and the potential for lost business relationships is often astronomical. Trust me when I say you can't afford to bear those costs and maximize sales and profits at the same time. 

 

By far the most critical component of any hiring process for salespeople is creating a strong profile of your ideal salesperson. My profile measures sales candidates according to three main criteria. I want my salespeople to match very closely the profile I establish with regard to my product or service, my buying process, and my company's mission and values. It doesn't matter how good a salesperson's resume is or how consistently they achieved their quota if they sold simple "widgets" and my product is of a more technical nature or if their sales experience is selling to an account on a monthly basis and mine is a complex one time transaction. Ditto if their sales process was six months long and consisted of a collaborative effort between many different people while mine is a more straightforward process requiring contact with a single decision maker.

 

Of course even the superstar who is a close match with the attributes of your product, service or buying process is a no go if they don't also match the most important criteria of all―that is, your company's core values, mission, and goals.

 

I know you understand how critical the sales function is to your company’s continued growth and success. I also know you appreciate how hard it is to attract and retain key people who meet the requirements necessary to effectively drive sales, maximize revenue opportunities, create profitability, and fuel consistent growth.  As your sales and marketing director, I'll work with you to create an accurate profile of your ideal salesperson and implement it as the centerpiece of a cost effective hiring process. 

 

 

“I watched George transform our sales department from a group of underachievers, to a world-class sales team.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                       read more                                                                                                               

                                                                                           ―Jim Pinder, MBA, CFRE Former Vice President of Operations

                                                                                                                                                                    Lifestyle Center of America

 

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