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The “Just” Trap: How Lazy Leadership Kills Sales Performance

By / / Coaching, Leadership, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Culture, Sales Growth, Sales Leadership, Sales Process Maps

In 30 seconds

The Problem: Leaders use “just” language – “just use the CRM,” “just focus on value” – which is lazy thinking disguised as decisiveness. This dumps complexity onto teams without frameworks, creating chaos and leaving people feeling inadequate when they can’t “figure it out.”

The Shift: “Just” signals abdication, not empowerment. Real leadership means doing the hard work of structuring complexity so teams can execute with confidence, not finding shortcuts that avoid the heavy lifting.

The Solution: Four leadership imperatives: Build tool integration into workflows; create specific sales frameworks replacing platitudes; establish continuous feedback loops beyond one-off training; coach through complexity using telemetry data. Discipline creates freedom: proper structure liberates teams from guessing and overwhelm, enabling high performance.

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One Bad Apple: Why Your Team’s Weakest Link Matters More Than You Think

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Leadership, Performance Management

In 30 seconds

Watch who you let near your mind. Professor Will Felps proved what leaders have long suspected: a single toxic team member can reduce overall performance by 30 to 40 per cent, even when everyone else is capable and motivated. Let’s face it, we’ve all had to remove some bad apples from our teams. The fear is real: losing their contribution, upsetting clients. But the relief is palpable when they have gone. Teams rally. Clients stay, often grateful for the change. Your ability to foster authentic human connection is your sustainable advantage. But you must actively protect it by …

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Stacking Up Sales: Developing Sales Technology

By / / Blog, Business Growth, CRM, Forecasting, Performance Management, Uncategorized

In 30 seconds

Developing sales technology stacks is crucial for businesses that want to improve their sales processes. By implementing key components such as CRM, marketing automation tools, and sales enablement platforms, businesses can increase efficiency, better analyse data, and provide an improved customer experience. While there may be challenges in integrating these technologies and considering costs, the benefits far outweigh the obstacles. Investing in sales technology stacks can lead to significant improvements in overall sales performance and ultimately drive business growth.

In 2.5 minutes

In today’s fast-paced AI emergent business environment, it’s more important than ever to have the right tools and …

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Sales Performance – what are we really measuring?

By / / Blog, Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales performance, Sales Results

The prevalent way of measuring sales performance is a combination of KPIs. These include the obvious sales results, and a few others, like number of calls and meetings, new opportunities, etc.

However, longer sales cycles and more complex ways of selling like Solution Selling and Value Based Selling, or segmentation approaches like Strategic / Key Account Management demand a more sophisticated approach to measuring effectiveness. The biggest challenge when measuring the performance of our sales teams is how to measure quality rather than just quantity of sales results.

Leaders need to move from a deficiency orientation …

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4 Questions to Test if your Sales & Prospecting Tactics are Ethical

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Ethics & Values, Performance Management, Prospecting, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Management, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Selling Better
  • Do other people stand to gain from your sales tactics and actions?
  • Do your sales tactics and actions have a positive influence on your own and others’ well-being and self-esteem?
  • Do your sales tactics and actions move you and your customer closer to your respective short- and long-term goals?
  • Would most people approve of how you prospect for new business and sell?

    • If each of us can honestly answer “yes” to these questions, then it would appear that our sales and prospecting efforts are underpinned by sound ethics and behaviours and set up to deliver a fair exchange of value for both buyer and …

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    Is an Organic Growth Strategy a better way to go?

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Entrepreneurship, Performance Management, Sales Results, Strategy, Success

    How do I grow my business?

    How do I get a better ROI?

    How do I get more profitable sales?

    How do I attract and convert more customer?

    These are some of questions entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs and sales leaders ask on daily basis. And rightly so. We need to ask questions of ourselves and how we run our businesses so as to be appraised of the better ideas that serve our goals and ambitions.

    To keep me fresh, I like to read widely and most recently, while sitting on a plane to Sydney, I came across a very interesting McKinsey article about the various …

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    The Flight to Ethical Selling – how the banks can avoid a royal commission

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Ethics & Values, Performance Management, Sales Culture

    Everybody lives by selling something and so it is true for the banks and financial services businesses; however, it seems that too many people in some divisions of some of the banking, financial planning and insurance institutions have confused ethical selling with unethical selling practices. Not all banks and financial institutions, mind you, but enough of the big ones to erode trust so badly that people are baying for a royal commission.

    When I first started introducing the discipline of Selling to the Australian banking sector back in early 1990’s I was met with a ‘we don’t sell’ mentality even though …

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    Metrics for Measuring Solution Selling

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Performance Management, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Social Sales, Solution Selling

    How do we measure sales performance now?

    As many formally product-focused companies migrate to selling solutions, most overlook one critical component – the way they measure sales performance.

    Sales people, using a solution-selling approach, generally nurture larger, more complex and lucrative deals; they are engaging in business-level discussions with key executives in prospect companies and invest heavily in building long-term, trust-based relationships with key decision makers. But in many instances, their success is still being measured using the old transaction-based sales metrics.

    Working with many, many sales leaders and their sales teams since 1995, we understand that while making the …

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    Survival of the Adaptive P3: Use Effective Sales Metrics

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Performance Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Strategy

    This series of ‘Survival of the Adaptive’ articles will look at the key things we need to do as sales teams to contend with the many changes afoot in our 21st century world and market place.

    Part 3 is all about using effective metrics to track sales

    In an ideal world, the financial returns and the ability of the sales force to generate business at respectable margins would be precisely calculated, and deciding the effectiveness of any sales strategy would be simple. In reality however, there are multiple, and usually imperfect ways to measure most …

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