Barrett Sales Blog - Helping people and businesses to sell better

Decarbonising Sales Leadership

By Jens Hartmann / 08/11/2022 / Blog, Decarbonising, Environment & Sustainability, Leadership, Sales Leadership, Sales Trends

Sales Trend 11 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2022 is about the role that sales leaders can play in decarbonising sales operations.

We see the sales leadership function as a supporting role, a key supporting role: sales leaders support salespeople, they support business success by ensuring expected sales outcomes and customer satisfaction and retention, and any other relevant business goals.

In that light, this trend is not about how to decarbonise sales leadership, but about how sales leadership can and should support decarbonising the sales operations in general.

From this perspective sales leadership …

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A sales career is brilliant for women

By Sue Barrett / 04/11/2022 / Blog, Gender & Sales, Sell Like A Woman, Success, women-in-sales

As a woman who’s been in business and sales for over 30 years, a business owner for 27 years of those years and a working mother for 24 years, I thought I’d share with you some interesting insights and research about how sales and sales leadership careers help empower and enable women to forge their careers, rise up the corporate ladder and enhance their earning potential all of which can be very good for women’s overall health and wellbeing.

The central theme here is Agency – in social science, agency is defined as the capacity of individuals to act independently and …

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The biases & challenges for women in sales

By Sue Barrett / 27/10/2022 / Blog, Gender & Sales, Leadership, Sales Leadership, Sell Like A Woman, women-in-sales

Last week I wrote about the benefits for businesses of having more women in their sales teams and leadership roles. I also mentioned how most women still don’t consider sales as a viable career. This is mostly due to persistent biases and outdated sales stereotypes and work practices.

Here are some of the common biases and challenges women and businesses face when it comes to capitalising on the power of women in sales and sales leadership.

Outdated Sales Stereotypes and Unconscious Biases

Sales has been seen largely as a man’s career and rarely promoted as a career in which women …

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It pays to Sell Like A Woman

By Sue Barrett / 20/10/2022 / Blog, Gender & Sales, Sales Leadership, Sales performance, Sell Like A Woman, women-in-sales

If you want to excel in sales and business, it pays to Sell Like A Woman.

Women AND the Competitive Advantage

Since the early 2000s, research into sales effectiveness shows women often outperforming men in achieving sustainable sales results and authentic, mutually prosperous client relationships, especially in B2B sales, bringing with them specific qualities and capabilities that differ from traditional sales stereotypes. That piqued my curiosity, confirmed my observations and the trends I was seeing towards more human-centred, inclusive business practices and has informed the work of the Barrett team ever since.

Qualities such as collaboration, creating a shared vision for success, …

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Decarbonisation in tendering – who leads and who follows?

By Bidwrite / 11/10/2022 / Blog, Decarbonising, Tendering

Sales Trend 10 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2022 is about the decarbonising in tendering.

By guest author David Lunn, MCIPS, CP. APMP – co-founder and Director, Bidwrite.

Organisations procuring goods and services through tendering specify what they want. Sometimes requirements are highly detailed. Other times they are not. And within these requirements more sophisticated buyers also point to broader agendas/needs that provide useful context to sellers. This is particularly true of larger corporates and Government or publicly funded entities. In these circumstances buyers are leading. Suppliers respond and support.

But the opposite is …

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The Rainmakers – learning how to sell professional services

By Sue Barrett / 07/10/2022 / Blog, RAIN maker

For many decades professional service providers (lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, banking, management consultants, engineers, architects, medical specialists, etc.) relied on their local networks for new client referrals. They usually developed a reputation amongst a select group of their friends, colleagues and local industry groups making them an attractive option that would bring business to their door.

While personal recommendations and referrals are still highly sought after, the days of only relying on referrals, especially local referrals, have passed. Markets have expanded, and professional service providers can often work from anywhere with clients further afield than their local neighbourhood. While industry and …

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Cats take the road less travelled by being human-centred

By Sue Barrett / 29/09/2022 / Attitudes & Behaviours, Blog, Human-centred, Success, Wellbeing

Despite the prevailing ‘leadership’ paradigms of the last 40-50 years of ‘win-at-all-costs’ profit maximisation, command-and-control, and the cult of celebrity CEOs, that haven’t been good for business sustainability, or the wellbeing of employees, suppliers, customers, communities, and the planet, it’s deeply satisfying as both a long-time advocate for human-centred, sustainable business practices and a Cats supporter, to see the Geelong Football Club (GFC) not only win another premiership but choose a different model to do so.

A model that values a human-centred, inclusive, community-minded, and respectful culture.

A model that includes and values the contributions made by all sorts of people making …

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Sales Career? There’s plenty to be proud of

By Sue Barrett / 15/09/2022 / Attitudes & Behaviours, Blog, Self Development

Pride is a contentious subject especially when it is associated with the sales profession.

On one hand, Pride is defined as a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired. Associated feelings like Satisfaction, Content, Fulfillment, Pleasure, Delight and Joy also spring to mind.

On the other hand, Pride, or the more accurate term Vainglory, describes excessive or ostentatious pride especially in one’s achievements resulting in vanity and potentially arrogance, conceit, pomp, ostentation, egotism, narcissism, pride, vanity, ego trip and …

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Sales skills future-proof careers and margins

By Sue Barrett / 09/09/2022 / Blog, Digital credentials, Education in Sales, Human-centred, Learning and Development, Sales Skills

We have discussed the importance of soft skills in the past, in fact, it was one of our 12 Sales Trends for 2020.

However, this is an increasingly relevant topic. It is estimated that by 2030 soft skills will be key in 2 out of 3 jobs. Those with the right skills in the right context will increasingly choose how, where and when they work, and businesses that invest in developing their employees’ soft skills will benefit, too. It’s been estimated by Deloitte Access Economics that employees with effective soft skills could increase revenue by more than $90,000 …

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Decarbonising Sales Training

By Jens Hartmann / 31/08/2022 / Blog, Decarbonising, Education in Sales, Environment & Sustainability, Learning and Development, Sales Training, Sales Trends, Sustainability & Environment

Sales trend 9 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2022 is about the changes we need to make to training and development programs to progress a decarbonised sales operation and how those changes have a positive impact in the ROI of training and development initiatives.

How much time do salespeople spend on the road, in cars or planes, in hotels, conference venues, away from work and their customers, to attend classic training events like a 2-day sales conference or days of workshops at headquarters? So when we talk about decarbonising sales training the question is twofold: Is it …

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