As a CEO or business leader, you need to have regular conversations with your sales managers. This is true regardless of your managers’ skill level.
Have you ever seen the movie French Kiss, with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline? One of my wife’s and my favorite lines from that script is this one: “Happy – smile. Sad – frown. Use the corresponding face for the corresponding emotion.” While it’s an entertaining scene in the movie, it might actually be a clarion descriptor of a serious problem for many sales organizations.
The sales profession is in trouble. The latest CSO Insights report shows that sales effectiveness has declined yet again this past year. Inside many companies, sales teams struggle to meet their quotas, and sales leaders and executives struggle to give their teams the tools, systems, and training they need.
A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the purported “death of solution selling,” reader response was tremendous. In the blog comments and on LinkedIn, readers shared a wealth of insights, discussion, and challenges to the article’s assumptions, all of which got me thinking more deeply about the Challenger vs. solution selling debate.
A while back, I was working with a client that provides brilliant cloud solutions with a compelling business case. When I asked what their biggest challenges were within the sales team they said: "Many of them can't seem to close... they want better closing techniques."
If you’ve been following me for long, you know I talk a lot about the importance of sales process. So, you may be surprised to hear me say that sometimes the sales process is the very thing that kills the sales organization.
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