sales management
Should B2B sales people prospect?
Historically, sales people have been responsible for both generating new opportunities (prospecting) and closing deals in the pipeline (opportunity management). However, this stance is being challenged. Spurred on by the trend towards inbound sales teams, and the importance of adding more value during the sales process, the sales space is a buzzing with ideas on how organizations can manage their sales efforts more effectively.
Motivation…Also a Sales Manager’s Job
Over the years I have heard from numerous CEOs and sales managers alike that believe that they should not have to help motivate their people to do their jobs. They believe that if they just hired “highly motivated” people they can just let them go. Well I say “Good luck with that.”
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?
