How we can learn MasterSales lessons

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Culture, Sales Leadership, Sales Talent

Like many people in Australia, my family and employees have been captivated by MasterChef Australia.

What I love about MasterChef is that it can be seen as a metaphor for expressing our talents and being the best we can be. Given my interest in everything to do with sales, personal mastery and performance, I particularly love the parallel I have been able to draw about what it takes to be an elite master chef and an elite sales person and elite sales leader by the observation I have made in MasterChef.

As lessons for people wanting to master the sales profession,MasterChef works …

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Are you creating competing motivations in your sales force?

By / / Ethics & Values, Sales Leadership, Strategy

How to incentivise and reward sales people has long been a contentious topic. Too many times I have seen businesses set up incentive programs that reward the wrong behaviours which can affect team morale, client relationships, sales, staff retention, and so on.

For instance, I recently met the managing director of a medium sized software business who asked me why would his sales people keep selling one version of their product when they had been instructed to also sell in a newer more comprehensive version of the product.

I asked him two questions:
1. “How do your sales people get incentivised for …

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Why you can’t have a one-type-of-sales-person-does-it-all approach

By / / Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Assessments, Sales Consulting, Sales Skills, Sales Talent

I find it somewhat frustrating when people make simplistic claims and statements about salespeople like: ‘super sales performers are all risk takers and oblivious to rejection and failure’.

Statements like this are simply not true and trivialise the complex world of selling by trying to box people without proper analysis and insight.

There is a large body of research that shows there are many types of sales people for different types of clients, products, and markets. Just because a sales person may be excellent in one market may not mean they are well suited for another.

Take call centres for instance. If the …

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Getting prospects to talk to you

By / / Call Reluctance, Communication, Prospecting, Resilience, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Skills, Sales Tips, Self Promotion

Do you take time to really think about why you are calling a prospect or a client? Do you reflect on how effective you have been post the call?

Making prospecting calls to new prospects and existing clients is still one of the most important sales and business development activities you can do on a daily basis. Even with all the electronic communication and marketing options at hand most businesses still need to have someone prospecting for them to build and forge real business relationships. Top performing sales people make sure prospecting is part of their daily repertoire.

Like many things prospecting …

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Does everyone live by selling something?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Education in Sales, Ethics & Values, Marketing, Procurement, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Leadership, Sales Skills, Teamwork, Vision, Mission & Purpose

‘Does everyone live by selling something?’

My desire to seek answers to this question was ignited back in the late 1980’s when I came across the quote ‘Everyone lives by selling something’. The quote was coined by Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist, poet, travel writer and author of ‘Treasure Island’, in the late 1880’s some 100 years earlier.

It is interesting to note that Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was also greatly admired by many authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov and others. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because …

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The Entrepreneurial Sales Person

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Emotional Intelligence, Neuroscience in Sales, Prospecting, Resilience, Role Clarity, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Relationships, Sales Talent, Self Development, Success

As part of my ongoing professional and personal development I belong to a CEO leadership group where we meet monthly and discuss a whole range of topics to stimulate our thinking and decision making.

Recently we discussed the concept and qualities of Successful Entrepreneurs. Besides making the obvious comparisons with ourselves as to whether we met the criteria of successful entrepreneurs I found the content translated extremely well into what I and other research is seeing in successful sales people today.

It seemed to me that successful sales people had a lot in common with successful entrepreneurs who are often the main …

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Create your ‘Ideal’ sales force blueprint

By / / Assessments, Competition, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Performance Management, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Role Clarity, Sales Consulting, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Leadership, Sales Planning, Sales Psychology, Sales Results, Sales Talent, Strategy

Now is the time to rethink your sales strategy and your sales force. Design the sales force your business needs and get great results.

Tip: It’s all in the thinking and planning that happens before the execution.

To help you start your thinking and planning here are two case studies from our work files where the businesses got it right.

Story one: Transform your current sales team into a new sales team

“The Sales Culture transformation and competency project we worked on with you in 2008 has been such a great success for our team. The culture is now fantastic and the morale of …

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Success is a moving platform

By / / Brand & Reputation, Business Acumen, Competition, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Sales Consulting, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Leadership, Sales Pioneer, Sales Relationships, Sales Strategy, Sales Training, Strategy, Sustainability & Environment, Vision, Mission & Purpose

Do you have the wrong sales team delivering your sales strategy?

Ask yourself the follow the questions:

  • How has your strategy and /or market place changed recently?
  • How have you seen the role of ‘sales’ change over the last few years in your industry?
  • How do your sales people compare to your competitors?
  • How do your sales people need to sell now?
  • How is your product offering behaving in the market place now? Was it once exclusive and now a commodity?

The definition of a ‘good’ salesperson is driven by many possible needs. Those needs are a function of industry standards, changing market conditions, competition, corporate strategy …

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The cost of poor sales selection

By / / Assessments, Brain Science, Brand & Reputation, Competition, Performance Management, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Assessments, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Management, Sales Psychology, Sales Research, Sales Talent

Have you ever done the math on how much sales recruitment costs you, especially when you get it wrong?

If you are like most managers then chances are you haven’t. So let’s consider the costs, overt and covert, involved in sales recruitment.

If you don’t know it already, sales recruitment is one of the toughest assignments around. I know this firsthand, as I was in this role for over 8 years with a leading consultancy and recruitment company. During this time, I interviewed about 8,000 sales people face-to-face in the technical, industrial, medical, and scientific industries. Remember, this is not counting all …

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Start small and really network

By / / Communication, Marketing, Networking, Prospecting, Social Media, Social Sales

I have attended my fair share of networking events and more often than not, I find that I do not get any quality time to network and begin the process of building viable business relationships for the future. I find the time allocated to speak with people and start to get to know them is often too short, coupled with too many other distractions.

When attending these networking events I find I usually get the most value out of listening to the key note speakers. If I am fortunate enough to strike up a meaningful conversation in between the breaks with …

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