e-lifeandwork: Learn New Skills Online | Online Courses & Real-World

CEO & Founder @ Refocus, VP of Marketing @ Coding Invaders. EdTech enthusiast, investor, mentor and marketing expert. According to an article in HR Daily Advisor, mistakes in hiring sales managers can cost a company an average of $2 million in lost sales. These lost costs also impact recruiting, training and salary expenses. How you hire and the processes you develop in your sales department can affect the well-being of your current specialists, the speed of processing applications, how you deal with rejections and how your sales team and marketers work together. At my current company, we have found five effective tools that have helped us double sales in a highly competitive educational technology market. I would like to share them here with you. 1. A Three-Step Hiring Process Every year, companies all over the world spend billions on sales recruitment, training and development. The three-step hiring system can help you make reasonable decisions about applicants befor...

Post-COVID-19, the future of working capital management has changed. Last year, supply chain complexity, inventory buffers, and loss of negotiating power all crimped many companies’ ability to reduce their working capital effectively. The height of the pandemic in 2020 also exposed weaknesses in supply chains. All those factors will increase the focus on how companies can improve working capital efficiency in 2021. In general, this year working capital management won’t be about squeezing suppliers on terms. For the 1,000 U.S. companies in the CFO/The Hackett Group Working Capital Scorecard, days payable outstanding (DPO, the number of days companies take to pay their suppliers)  increased by 7.6% in 2020, to an all-time high of 62.2 days, up from 57.8 days in 2019. (See chart below.) (For more on the scorecard’s results, see Thursday’s story, Working Capital: A Tumultuous Year.) The biggest opportunities to improve working capital now are those components that lockdowns hit...