How much valuable selling time are you wasting?

By / / Education in Sales, Sales Culture, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Uncategorized

When it comes to sales productivity and sales performance many companies are shortchanging themselves and, unfairly blaming their salespeople for poor sales performance results.

How can that be? Well too many businesses pay salespeople for business development and then lumber them with non-revenue, non customer oriented activities such as administration, unnecessary internal meetings, service delivery or transactional account problems.  And whilst acknowledging that these are very much a part of managing the client’s experience and classified under the sales portfolio, the haphazard manner in which these are structured does little to encourage optimal live …

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Leadership in Uncertain Times

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Education in Sales, Sales Leadership, Sales Management

In December 2012, like in the previous years, we published the 12 Sales Trends Report for 2013 and released a brief summary of each trend. Throughout the year we will look into each of them a little deeper. This month we are focusing on the Sales Trend “Leadership in uncertain times”.

Extreme uncertainty is the new norm.  Living in a constant state of fear and anxiety only leads to more fear and anxiety. Research shows that highly distracted or stressed people don’t and can’t innovate and change and without purposeful leadership and reason …

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If you’re a sales person you should be a brand leader

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Marketing

In the last 40 years the concept of branding, as a means of differentiating one company or product from another, has become an important and powerful marketing tool. Enormous sums of money, and extensive executive time has been invested in developing and promoting brands, and making sure that more buyers were aware of the value that a brand had to offer.

Since then many people – particularly those in the public eye, including actors and politicians – have come to recognise the value of developing a strong brand. It wasn’t too long before some

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Enthusiasm in Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Life Skills, Sales Skills, Sales Talent

There is a popular fallacy that salespeople are born, not made. Whilst there is some vestige of truth in the statement, it is not for the reasons made so popular – i.e. it’s not that salespeople have the ‘gift of the gab’ but rather because these successful salespeople are genuinely enthusiastic about what they do and helping prospects find a solution.  These salespeople have a purpose to what they do and enjoy the process of discovery, problem solving and collaboration with others.

This does not mean that …

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Are you paying salespeople enough to sell well?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Talent

Are you paying your salespeople enough to enable them to focus on selling and not worry about where their next paycheck is coming from?  Because if salespeople are constantly worrying about when they are going to get paid, how can they sell well?

For many years, unlike most other salaried employees who can rely on a regular weekly/monthly pay check, salespeople have often been required to live hand-to-mouth – making sales and waiting for their commission or bonus to supplement their living income.  Often the …

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Mastering the Sales Management Essentials

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Coaching, Education in Sales, Sales Coaching, Sales Forecasting, Sales Leadership, Sales Management

What are the Sales Management Essentials and how do we master them?  Well firstly Sales management and leadership is not about selling!

In fact when one examines the role of the modern sales leader it quickly becomes evident that there just isn’t time to sell. Equipping sales leaders to perform the tasks for which they are responsible, and sustaining the momentum of the sales force in its drive for incremental value and volume, at the same time as continuously improving the customer experience, is a challenge that demands a high degree of maturity, dedication, …

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Ego is a dirty word in sales & sales management

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Communication, Competition, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Emotional Intelligence, Resilience, Sales Management, Sales Talent, Wellbeing

Having a big ego is often associated with the sales profession.   For many years the supercharged Alpha male, 600 lb sales gorilla has been the poster person for successful salespeople.   And then there is the larger than life sales manager who charges in to save the day by taking over the sales call, making the sale and demonstrating to everyone present just how much better he is than the salesperson.  With stories like these swirling in the ether, it is often assumed that a …

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First, people buy the salesperson

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Customer Service, Education in Sales, Sales Skills

Here’s a simple reality… Prospects and customers buy the salesperson first during every sales call – or they don’t buy at all.

In any major sale, especially Business-to-Business (B2B) or complex Business-to-Consumer sales, the prospect or customer makes a predictable series of buying decisions that lead to a final purchasing decision. The first and perhaps the most important of these is:

                ‘Do I buy what this salesperson is saying?’

This decision is always made before the prospect or customer will seriously consider factors such as your product or service offering and price.  Yet many

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Empathy – The New Sales Edge

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Emotional Intelligence, Life Skills, Mindful selling, Neuroscience, Sales Psychology

Late last year we published the 12 Sales Trends Report for 2013 and released a brief summary of each sales trend in December.  Over the year we will delve a little deeper into each sales trend.  To kick off the New Year we will focus on the Sales Trend Empathy.

This sales trend is seeing smart businesses making it a priority to redress the balance and develop our brains’ Interpersonal sensitivities: our empathetic side to take into account the needs of others as well …

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