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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Punished by Rewards

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Emotional Intelligence, Ethics & Values, Neuroscience, Neuroscience in Sales, Performance Management, Sales Leadership, Sales Motivation & Rewards

Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.

As part of my own development and in an attempt to keep my mind as open and fresh as possible, I take to reading all sorts of things. On my current reading list is a very interesting book called “Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn, author, speaker and educator. He writes about the trouble with “gold stars, incentive plans, As, praise and other bribes”.

In light of current discussions and debates about the issues surrounding CEO performance bonuses and …

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Sales Training is not a luxury – it’s essential

By / / Education in Sales, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Culture, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Research, Sales Skills, Sales Training

Keeping you and your sales team ‘match fit’ and actively engaged in the market place selling effectively is paramount to your survival and success in today’s market. Yet too many businesses, large and small, do not train their sales teams in the vital skills needed in the much more consultative, value add, less product focused market of today.

I was reminded of this again when I was speaking with a 35+ year veteran in sales and sales management who works in the office equipment and facilities management industry. We were discussing the sales team he has inherited recently and how they …

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12 steps field sales coach plan

By / / Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Management

The reality is that most sales managers do not spend enough time with their staff in a coaching capacity. Providing constant feedback and being a role model who demonstrates the right skills.

Many managers today are still focusing too heavily on short term efficiency and not long term effectiveness. Development of staff through on-the-job coaching is a critical function of modern day managers but can take second place to some of the more urgent, but less important priorities.

On-the-job coaching is something that managers recognise they need to do with junior members of the team. When it comes to salesperson …

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The Power of Women in Sales Leadership

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Gender & Sales, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Relationships, Sales Research

As the New York Stock Exchange is now looking at “employee engagement” as a significant predictor of higher share value and market return, and given we are all competing, not just for clients and market share but for good employee talent, maybe a key performance indicator for sales management could be in Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB).

I came across some recent research into sales management, and it got me thinking about how team leaders were not allowed to “mother” their sales teams.

A loaded term, “mothering”, and without proper definition creates myths and innuendo where none should exist. The following research piece …

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Selling and managing are not the same

By / / Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Results

Last week I spoke about sales burnout and the challenges many SME business owners have of being all things to all people including, usually, the main sales person and sales manager.Like many people, I have known that selling and managing are not the same thing. They are two very distinct jobs with different demands and expectations.

Some home truths about sales management:

  • Sales teams cannot be lead from behind a desk.
  • Sales people cannot be cloned into the image of the top sales-person-now-sales-manager.
  • Mediocre supervision can put a big dent in the effectiveness of good salespeople.
  • Sales people need sales leaders and coaches, not administrators …

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