The 5 Dimensions for Sales Alignment, Harmony & Success

By / / Assessments, Education in Sales, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Leadership, Success

As CEOs and sales leaders, we understand that there are many factors that make for a successful sales strategy, operating system and sales team in the competitive, complex, variable world of selling. Leading a sales team and operation is like bringing together an orchestra where there is a fine line between success and failure, being harmonious or out of tune.

As sales professionals, we can often find ourselves either ‘firing on all cylinders’, ‘kicking goals’ and ‘getting the job done’ or feeling ‘not quite right’, ‘out of sorts’, or ‘off our game’ and often not really sure as …

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Are your salespeople stumbling at hello?

By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales performance

We all want better sales performance and, as I mentioned last week, there are different ways to get there. A good starting point to understand what your team needs to sell better and improve their performance is assessing where they need help.

For example, through an attitude and activity based questionnaire you can measure if people avoid making phone calls to prospect, if they hesitate to prospect, and self-promote for new business. You can also identify how much initiative, energy and drive an individual devotes to proactive sales prospecting and the amount of energy spent …

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Cracking the Sales Myth of Hunters & Farmers

By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Talent

Many so called “experts” claim that there are two types of salespeople – Hunters and Farmers.

Salespeople, so these experts claim, are either one or the other. Consequently they fit one sales position or another. In our experience, having spent decades working with salespeople at every level in a wide variety of segments, salespeople don’t fit into these neat stereotypes.

The myth about Hunters and Farmers in Selling has been overtaken by a business reality.

Before we crack the myth let’s take a look at where the concept came from in the first place.

The person credited with starting the concept …

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Does anyone really know what I’m supposed to be doing?

By / / Assessments, Role Clarity

Do you often find yourself torn between meeting the needs of your manager, the desires of your customers and the requirements of your role? If you answered ‘yes’, you’re not alone. All too often we see salespeople who feel they are ‘the meat in the sandwich’. They consistently go above and beyond to meet all their stakeholders’ needs, often leading to increased stress, frustration, fatigue and burnout. In these instances, it is not uncommon to find that different stakeholder groups have a different perspective or understanding of the required capabilities, competencies and performance criteria for the salesperson’s role. This can …

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Make 2012 The Best Year Yet – Put Yourself First!

By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Communication, Success, Teamwork

As we all come sailing in from the rather stormy seas of 2011 for a brief rest in a safe harbour we can chose to look back and reflect on what has happened in 2011; the challenges, mistakes, triumphs and lessons learned. Although reflection is very important we must not forget to take time to rest, relax and recharge before we look forward and dream about the future and what it holds for us.

2011 may have left you feeling overwhelmed running from one task to the other never stopping to rest and recoup. If you can take time to just …

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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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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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The Dark Side

By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, Neuroscience, Neuroscience in Sales, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Psychology, Self Development, Uncategorized, Wellbeing

How well can we manage ourselves, our teams and businesses in a crisis or tough times?

Are our actions and behaviours putting us, our people and our businesses at risk?

As leaders and managers we are on show and our actions often speak louder than our words. In challenging times this is even more evident. Under pressure cracks may appear and our leadership is put to the test.

How do we cope under pressure? What happens to us when we crack? When placed under high levels of pressure, most people will rely on coping mechanisms or their strengths …

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Daring to be Different (part 2)

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

Here is the second of two articles about recruiting top performing sales people and daring to do so from outside of your industry.

Even though I have not worked as a traditional recruitment consultant for more than 14 years many of my long standing clients still talk about those ‘out of the box’ placements we made. Was it just the recruitment approach that made the difference. Well NO. What these savvy mangers is did was make sure the culture and the business could accommodate these ‘new’ types of people.

They took their current team along on the journey to …

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Thinking of promoting your best sales performer to sales manager? Think again!

By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Role Clarity, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Talent

Many businesses have made the mistake of promoting their best performing sales person into the role of sales manager. Their logic – well they are great at selling, they’ll be great at sales management. Sadly most of these situations end in disaster.

To start off the top performing sales person has usually been given no training or a development framework to help them make the transition into what is a very different role. It is almost assumed they will know how to be a sales manager because they ‘know’ (sadly usually only intuitively) how to sell. The …

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