Industry Experience and Product Knowledge aren’t enough

By / / Business Acumen, Education in Sales, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Consulting, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Strategy

As much as people want Sales to be considered a science the reality is that Sales has always combined a collection of facts with human judgments (or estimates). What this means is that there is no analytic approach that can single-handedly guarantee sales success. Result – Sales is likely to always be a mixture of art and science. So how do you sure up your success to gain that competitive edge? For the last few decades when transactional, product-pushing sales was all that mattered, most

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Stop Throwing our Salespeople and Sales Managers into the Deep End

By / / Education in Sales, Role Clarity, Sales Coaching, Sales Culture, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Relationships, Sales Training, Success

Isn’t it about time we stop throwing our sales people and sales managers in the deep end and expecting them to swim – or sell and lead with no support or training in this case? Isn’t it about time that we had frank conversations with our potential recruits about what sales and sales manager roles really entail and make sure our recruits really do have the skills, mindset and knowledge to take on the …

Stop Throwing our Salespeople and Sales Managers into the Deep End Read Post »

Make Sales Coaching THE priority & coach your way to success

By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management

What sales leader wouldn’t like to see shortened sales cycles leading to more comprehensive deals with better margins? These are just some of the benefits of effective sales coaching. ‘Make coaching THE priority and coach your way to sales success’ was voted the second most important sales trend for 2012 from The 12 Sales Trends of 2012 by our readers. This comes at a critical time for business. Selling is now a highly skilled role requiring skilful people to execute sales strategy, win new clients, grow and retain existing …

Make Sales Coaching THE priority & coach your way to success Read Post »

Move Over Marketing Here Comes Sales Strategy!

By / / Marketing, Sales Leadership, Sales Planning, Sales Strategy, Success

The pundits (including Barrett) are always reminding sales executives of the need to plan. However, a major miscalculation made by many organisations is viewing their sales operations as purely tactical functions. The result – at best, sales plans become little more than operational imperatives bumping along one quarter to the next with no strategic intent.

More and more, the high cost of selling, longer lead times and the multitude of choice that customers have – coupled with rampant (and often aggressive and diversifying) competition, diminishing product differentiation and …

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Turning Underperformers Into Sales Winners

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

Underperforming sales people plague sales managers and organisations in every industry sector. Over the decades business leaders have adopted an assortment of tactics to combat and address this issue, with most showing little in return. Some large businesses have a policy to let go of the bottom 10-20% of sales performers each year and replenish with new sales blood. Other organisations are too slow to address the real issues affecting poor sales performance often tolerating incompetence. Neither strategy is useful, leaving people operating in a climate of fear or mediocrity. …

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No Sales Leadership + No Accountability = No Sales Results

By / / Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Results, Success

Companies spend billions each year on sales training, organisational development, leadership training and other efforts to ultimately boost sales results. Often this is a waste of money because nothing changes for the better. Too busy looking for a short term boost, magic bullet or quick fix, i.e. the 1-3 day motivational sales training event, many business and sales leaders miss the vital point that sales training, more correctly termed sales fitness and evolution, is a long term investment. Smart business …

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What Athletes, Top CEO’s and Pop Stars Have in Common

By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Training, Self Development, Success

Elite athletes, pop stars, top selling writers, politicians, Fortune 100 CEO’s all have one thing in commonthey hire coaches to help them achieve their goals faster and become or maintain their ‘number one’ status. Elite performers see the value their coach brings to their craft. They know their coach will help them gain and create insights that transform their performance. The rest of us can take the same approach. Many salespeople see the value of hiring a sales coach to help maintain an edge internally and over …

What Athletes, Top CEO’s and Pop Stars Have in Common Read Post »

Why B2B Buying Decisions Are Taking Longer Than Ever

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Mindful selling, Sales Coaching, Sales Forecasting, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Pipeline, Sales Planning, Sales Relationships, Sales Training

Are companies taking longer to make buying decisions or does it come down to impatience on the part of the B2B sales person, in a hurry to reach their sales targets? It seems nowadays buying decisions are taking longer to make than in previous years. This slow purchasing process isn’t just happening at the enterprise level in large scale businesses, it’s extended right across the board.

Protracted buying is dramatically slowing the sales process. The flow-on effects of such time delays are causing blow-outs in the cost of sale for many

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Learning how to ride the Boom AND Bust economy

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Marketing, Resilience, Sales Culture, Sales Leadership, Sales Planning, Sales Results, Strategy

These turbulent, challenging and sometimes volatile times we find ourselves living in are making many of us rethink how we do business, how we live our lives and how we engage with the world. Unless you are hiding under the doona, the rest of us are witnessing and experiencing a major transition from the Industrial Revolution to a brave new world of the New Tech paradigm.

This transition is exciting and frightening at the same time because the ‘new order’ is not ordered at all. It keeps changing at a rapid rate leaving a constant sense of unease. Many of the …

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