Are you doing ”busy-work” or progressing towards your sales targets?

If there’s something that we all have in common, I’d reason it is time. How we choose to spend it determines how we feel and what accomplishments we achieve. A big problem is that there’s often a conflict between what’s important and what’s urgent, between short and long-term gains. Checking emails every five minutes may increase your dopamine levels, but it probably won’t take you much closer to your sales targets.

Generalization: poison or potion?

As human beings, we make thousands of decisions every day. Most of them are made unconsciously, based on past experiences and established routines. Without even reflecting, we constantly adopt a process called generalization – to make our world easier to understand, we lump and categorize information in terms of how objects and situations are like or unlike others. As part of this process, we also ignore and distort information to better fit with our world-view, purpose and intent.

Selling value - everything you always wanted to know

Some news stories just don't go away. They remain in the news more because the media continues to milk these stories then readers demand to know more. Within sales the stories of the recent past are about Social Selling, Inbound Marketing, LinkedIn, Twitter, CRM and Lead Nurturing. Maybe it is time for sales experts to change focus and be addressing topics more closely aligned with helping sellers sell.

A realistic approach to goal setting in b2b sales

Let’s start with a statistic: quota attainment in B2B sales is currently around 60%. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. On the contrary, it has been status quo for the last number of years. Yet despite the 40% failure rate, we continue with the same quota expectations and the same goal setting practices year after year after year - somehow expecting a different result. How about trying something different in 2015?

Systematic on-boarding programs predict success

As part of our work with clients, we sometimes help them improve their hiring effectiveness and efficiency by introducing an assessment into their hiring process. I have found that hiring managers occasionally get lulled to sleep believing that because the candidate was recommended by the assessment, and HR screened them that they will just step into the position and be a superstar. I wish it worked that way, but it doesn’t.

5 elements preventing sales manager effectiveness

I recently spoke to two entrepreneurs from two separate companies, who had recently hired new sales managers. In both cases, the new managers had the right skills but still failed to have an impact on their sales force.

Recruiting a new sales manager can help address declining or inconsistent results. However, in order to succeed they must be able to provide consistent coaching and support, while holding each sales person accountable to what they need to do to succeed.