Building The Most Effective Sales Force In The World: The Era Post The Global Financial Crisis
Because of its emotional component, the sales organization is often vulnerable to faddish, silver bullet solutions—claiming that all you need is this new incentive plan or organizational structure.
Well-Known 'Secrets'
With all the forces of change in today's world of work, the basic principles for leading winning teams remains unchanged.
16 Excuses Sales People Need To Stop Using
Sales people make a number of excuses why they can't reach their sales targets or why prospects and customer don't buy.
Retention Is A Problem That Won't Go Away
What are the critical factors that contribute to the retention of top producing salespeople? Why are some sales managers able to consistently recruit and retain quality salespeople, while other managers have a revolving door?
Sales Is A Team Effort
Sales numbers and sales processes should be understood and owned by everybody in your organisation. In today's world if you are not directly in sales you are supporting someone who is. This is why sales really is a team effort.
Creating An Effective Sales Performance Management System
There are a number of key principles for effective sales performance management systems. The first place to start is to align your sales performance management system and subsequent key measures to your organisation's strategy and goals.
Building Your Sales Metric Management System In 4 Easy Steps
Every sales manager is searching for revenue from their sales force, but the recipe to achieving the revenue target comes from the development of their unique sales metric management system.
Matching The Right Sales Personality To The Right Sales Job
There are many different types of sales roles - and types of salespeople that fill them. Some need to be prospecting fit, while others needs to be detailed, patient and thorough. The key to sales success is to match these two together well.
How To Forecast Sales
With an unforgiving market and customer loyalty on the wane, an accurate forecast is increasingly important. But is it attainable? This article debunks the myth that an accurate sales forecast is impossible and explains how your organisation can achieve it.
Matching Sales Strategy To Product
Opportunities for further profitable sales can sit untapped in many businesses, because of a misalignment with strategy, product and salespeople fit.
Top 5 Selling Activities: Priorities For Sales Managers
Here's a list of the top five things Sales Managers should be watching for as they review the opportunities being worked on by their teams.
Better Sales Conversion Through Measuring
For better sales conversion, you must eliminate waste. It's easy to waste too much time and money trying to convert customers and waste revenue from failing to convert customers. To speed up the process, you must measure your Sales Conversion Rate.
The Makings Of A Successful Salesperson
Not everyone is cut out for a career in sales. But in today's world - where customers have numerous choices of service and product providers - an organisation without a core of well-trained, highly motivated sales professionals, is not going to be as successful as it could be.
The Three 'Real' Secrets Of Hiring Top Sales Reps
Ask any business owner or Sales Manager what one of the biggest challenges they face in making their revenue numbers, and they'll tell you it's identifying, hiring and retaining good sales reps.
Boost Results By Activating Sales Expectations
The strategy of activating sales expectations is one of the most important. But what does it mean and how do you do it?
Accelerate Your Sales Effort With Benchmarking
Sales benchmarking allows salespeople to better manage their most precious resource: time. Data-driven decision-making eliminates non value-adding activities that consume selling time and focuses on opportunities with the highest probability of success.
Earning Or Draining - Are Your Costs Drowning Your Bottom Line?
A better approach to understanding the factors impacting sales cycle length and those affecting overall sales processes is a calculation known as Break-Even Sales Volume.
How To Retain Your Best Salespeople
It all comes down to this. If you give your salespeople what they can't get anywhere else, why would they ever resign?
Taking On The Role Of Sales Manager - How To Conquer The New Terrain
The move from top-performing salesperson to sales manager is more than just a cumbersome exercise in transporting pictures, pens and kitschy paraphernalia. The transition can be a tumultuous, arduous journey.
The Move To Sales Management - Assessing The Fit
Selling and managing sales are two different disciplines, involving two different sets of skills. Much of what may have made a sales star excel - independence, the ability to close a deal no matter what, and a fierce competitive spirit (even when competing against their peers) - are not the traits associated with legendary sales managers.
Guaranteeing The Revenue Result
How do you increase the chance that your sales targets will be achieved? How do you ensure the sales-force lands the sales result in a timely fashion, and avoid finishing 10% down? In my experience, the answer lies in the following 4 key points.
Manage Or Damage - Is Your Funnel Ratio Up To Par?
A company-specific Funnel Ratio, also known as the Pipeline Ratio, proves essential for maintaining sustained balance within your funnel and among accounts.
Managing A Millennial Sales Team
Seasoned sales managers are facing challenges managing new Millennials - also known as Gen Y, or people born after 1980. These new sales professionals have a different approach to life, which greatly impacts their ability to sell effectively. Here's how to get the most from them.
Achieving Greater Efficiency With Your Sales Force
Just because your sales force seem to be working hard doesn't mean they're working efficiently and acheiving their full sales potential.
Maximise Growth By Managing Your Sales Force Knowledge
In most cases, sales forces are as desperate for the right guidance and direction to conduct their sales activities as their managers' need for their sales teams to conform to the right procedures. Organisations with solid systems can usually deliver a 25-35% increase in results.
Ten Keys To A Successful Sales Transformation
Ten principles for organisations contemplating an overhaul of their sales function that help minimise the risks.
A Best Practice For Shortening Sales Cycle Length
The accuracy of revenue forecasts is heavily reliant on information from the field. But, salespeople often times aren't estimating the correct time frame for a large sale, which inevitably throws sales calculations off balance.
Finding And Fixing Sales Performance Problems - Defining The Problem
This article looks at how a sales operation can identify its strengths and weaknesses and drive performance improvement.
Finding And Fixing Sales Performance Problems - The Performance Improvement Process
This article looks at the performance improvement process and the role of the sales manager.
Finding And Fixing Sales Performance Problems - Defining The Solution
This article looks at first-meeting-to-proposal and proposal-to-order ratios.
Maximising Channel Performance
Today, more suppliers are using channels for complex sales, characterised by multiple buying influences and a high level of perceived risk on the part of the buyer.
The Top Five Traits Of A Successful Salesperson
If you're looking for a successful salesperson to hire - a salesperson who not only CAN sell but WILL sell - look for a salesperson with PRIDE.
Sales Force Performance: Recruit Your Way To The Top!
Essentially, a sales manager's primary responsibility is to recruit, train and motivate their sales force to achieve peak performance. Of these three vitally important tasks, recruiting is the least understood and by far the most challenging.
Retail Success - The Right People In The Right Places
One of the main areas that retailers feel that they fall down in is in area of generating leads.
Sales Meetings
Sales meetings, in particular, are an important tool for helping you to keep your team's performance on track. Successful meetings require a range of skills, a disciplined approach and an effective leader.
The Cost Of Not Training Your Sales Team
I don't know about you, but when markets start to tighten or when things feel a bit uncertain, instead of cost cutting and bunkering down, I have found that you need to do precisely the opposite. You need to invest in your sales efforts with good strategy, sales training, good sales management and good sales coaching.
Mother Of A Sales Performance
As the New York Stock Exchange is now looking at "employee engagement" as a significant predictor of higher share value and market return, and given we are all competing, not just for clients and market share but for good employee talent, maybe a key performance indicator for sales management could be in Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB).
Sales Recruitment
Your small business is growing and diversifying. You've experimented with bringing on an inexperienced sales person, who did not work out. You realise you need a more experienced sales person, however you do not know where to find them and what to look for.
Coach Your Sales People To Think Like Entrepreneurs
The first step in successful coaching is to help your sales people create their preferred futures by helping them set their goals, objectives, and desired results.
Strategies Of Winning Sales Organisations
What are Winning Sales Organisations (WSOs) doing more often and better than other sales organisations?
Motivation Or Manipulation?
What is the line between motivating sales staff and manipulating sales staff? How do you make sure you don't go over the line and place people under extreme pressure to achieve?
Selling And Managing Are Not The Same
Like many people, I have known that selling and managing are not the same thing. They are two very distinct jobs with different demands and expectations.
Five Steps To Unlock Your Sales Team's Potential
Each manager has the ability to see the potential in their sales team, but how many actually have the skills to ensure each team member's potential is realised?
How To Compensate Your Sales Team
Although this article will not spell out what and how you should be paying your salespeople, it will guide you through the issues and factors that you need to consider in making successful compensation decisions, whether large or small.
Implementing An Effective Sales Process
Successful implementation of a common sales process within a sales-driven organisation, although requiring work, provides advantages. Those businesses that have a specific sales system benefit significantly at several levels.
Four Reasons Your Salespeople Stop Selling
It's something that happens to most managers at some time. A problem that's likely to keep us awake nights, tossing and turning and seeing the business going down the drain.
Increase Profitability By Understanding Your Sales Team
Have you ever closely examined why some people are wildly successful at selling, meeting and exceeding every goal placed in front of them, while others lack either the self motivation or certain key skill sets to get them to their next level of growth and performance?
Wanted! Real Sales Leaders (Fake Leaders Need Not Apply)
How to be a real sales leader, and not just a sales manager.
Motivating Your Sales Team
Money is not necessarily the only, or best, way to motivate your sales force.
Incentives And Rewards For Sales Support Staff
Support people frequently see - and hear about - the large gifts or rewards given to the sales people in their business. And these gifts or rewards - such as the annual sales dinner, the ‘conferences’ away and, of course, the money - seem even larger when compared with their own salary.
Action-Oriented Sales Leadership
Executive sales leaders are chartered with delivering sustainable results. Getting results is, in turn, about effectively removing barriers to success. And removing barriers to success includes keeping a sales team "laser-focused" on solving problems that help clients achieve their business goals. While this all sounds reasonable - why is it so difficult to execute?
Sales Effectiveness: Shortening The Sales Cycle
Reducing the time to close a deal is certainly top of mind for any sales executive and has a huge impact not only on the success of the business, but also on the organisation's ability to develop what is commonly described as a high performance sales culture: one of winning, confidence and efficiency. Here are five ways to affect the sales culture in a positive way by reducing the time it takes to sell a product or a service.
Sales Talent: Shifting The Performance Curve
Achieving tangible business results through the performance and productivity of people (especially salespeople) can be very difficult. There are challenges and opportunities in maximising the value of one of the most valuable assets in your company: your salespeople. Shifting the performance curve of your sales people can drive greater business results quickly and upgrade your overall talent.
Performance Pay: The Case Against
Few suggestions inflame passions faster than the suggestion that performance pay be abolished.
Is Your Marketing Manager Redundant?
You know, I’d hate to be a marketing manager in a typical service—based firm. The problem is, in such a firm, there’s precious little for a marketing manager to manage!
Sales Effectiveness... Why A Sales 'Culture' Is Critical For Success
Many companies still adhere to the 'pay myth' that holds that pay is the cornerstone for managing sales performance. The belief is that, if you set sales compensation right, you'll get better sales results.
Sales People Shouldn’t Have To Get Out To Get On!
Years ago as a state and then national sales manager, I used to hear many sales people say ‘I don’t want to stay being a rep all my life.’ This is a terrible sentiment for people in selling to possess and express, and the consequences of such an attitude will have a negative impact on customers, the organisation and the reps themselves. Where did such a belief spring from, what could make sales people operate with such a low self—esteem about their work? If we trace all problems back to ourselves in management we will see the answer.
If You Need To Reduce Profits...Do Some 'Sales Training'!
Take the sales team off the road, pay big money to feed them nonsense, send them back to market worse than ever ... and watch results plummet!
How To Help Your People Sell Better To Different Types Of Buyers
As a Sales Manager with over 20 years of sales experience I have learned intuitively how to 'read' people in a sales situation. I know whether I am 'getting through' or not with a prospect. I sense if I am 'on the same wave length' or not. It just feels right when I am, and it's obvious when I'm not. So why don't our sales people always understand this?
How To Find Good Sales People
One of the most challenging and least understood aspects of sales management is recruiting.
Incentives ... And Other Impediments To Sales Success
If you wanted me to ride a motorbike and I did too, but I had no idea how to ride one, would you organise training for me or an incentive?
Is Your Sales Team Expansive ... Or Just Expensive?
An effective sales team is a welcome investment, while an ineffective sales team is an unwanted cost...
Busting A Sales Slump
How to turn around poor sales performers.
How To Keep Your Salespeople On-Track and Achieving Their Targets
Motivating and developing high achieving sales people is a never ending challenge.
The 6 Vital Functions Of Sales Management
The skills that made you successful in sales are NOT the same skills that will guarantee you success in sales management.
How To Become A TOP GUN Sales Manager
Over the last 30 years I have been privileged to know and work with some remarkably successful Sales Managers. I work with many such Managers now as we develop their sales teams all over the world. There are certain things they know and do that make them extraordinary Sales Managers. I'd like to share them with you.
Sharing 'Wins'
How to build self esteem and motivate your sales people.
How To Motivate Your Sales Team
Why self-image is the real key to behaviour modification.
Is There A Weak Link In Your Sales Chain?
Every time a customer or a potential customer communicates with your company a "Moment of Truth" occurs. It's an opportunity for them to have either a positive or negative experience. It's also a "Moment of Opportunity" to either build or destroy this relationship. The skills and attitudes of all your people who have customer contact will decide the outcome.
Your Hidden Sales Team
Sometimes your top sales person may not be a sales person!