Sales Development System Sales Management

Sales Managers: Talent Development IS the Work!

Sales managers, if you don’t make sales talent development your top priority, then you’re not really doing your job. There was a rather popular Forbes article a few months ago written by Shep Hyken, entitled, “57% Of Sales Reps Missed Their Quotas Last Year.” The main thrust of the article[...]

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Sales Enablement Insights Sales Management Uncategorized

Avoid the Echo Chamber

The last presidential election in the United States brought created an awareness of “echo chambers.”  What is the sales version of the echo chamber? Where is the echo chamber most harmful to sales leaders?   And most importantly,what can you do about it? How can you avoid the echo chamber? An[...]

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Sales Management sales meetings

Sales Culture Happens One Bit at a Time

I recently traveled to a client’s 2019 sales meeting to conduct a workshop with sales leadership. I love sales meetings because they’re wonderful opportunities to build sales culture. At the conference registration desk, the client thoughtfully provided me with a “swag bag” they were handing out to all meeting attendees. Nestled[...]

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Industry Insights

New Year Tradition: 2019 Sales Resolutions

It’s become an annual tradition for me to offer some sales resolutions for the upcoming year, so my 2019 Sales Resolutions list is here. Some sales organizations are still frantically clawing for revenue before the current calendar year closes, and I’ll commiserate for a moment with them. It sucks, doesn’t[...]

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Sales Coaching Sales Management

The Best Managers are Unequal but Fair

In my second job after college, I worked as a salesperson for a small professional services company.  One day, our best salesperson (not me, unfortunately) told us he was leaving. I didn’t understand it – Brad was killing it, and under our commission-heavy comp plan, he was making stratospheric money.[...]

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Sales Coaching Sales Management Sales Training

Coach Like You Want Them To Sell

Coaches, here’s the number one reason it pays to employ a consultative coaching method:  Coaching is modeling.  What do I mean by this? Coaching = Modeling When you Engage reps and start with their needs, you’re modeling the consultative sequence you want reps to follow – start with the Real[...]

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Sales Development System Sales Management Sales Training Uncategorized

How to Develop Millennials Into World-Class Sales Leaders

A new generation of sellers and value creators is on the job today, and we have a golden opportunity to develop millennials into world-class sales leaders. Based on my birth year, I am a member of Generation X, but I consider myself a generation-straddler because my siblings were born between[...]

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Industry Insights Sales Enablement Insights Sales Training

You Need Flipped Sales Training – Here’s How to Do It

The flipped classroom is a hot topic in education today, to the point you would think it’s a new phenomenon.  While credit for the origin of today’s flipped classroom goes back to a couple of high school teachers in 2007, technology has been transforming and upending the learning process since[...]

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Sales Development System Sales Enablement Insights Sales Training

Smarter Sales Training Starts with Smarter Learning Objectives

Once upon a time, a private company in the aviation industry approached us because the VP of sales wanted “closing skills training.”  His evidence:  CRM data showing abnormally long sales cycles for their industry, plus personal experience in the field with sales reps following up but not closing. We came[...]

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Industry Insights Sales Coaching Sales Management

The #1 Differentiator In B2B Sales

Strong sales management capability is the most important piece when assembling an industry-leading sales force, and it may be the #1 differentiator in all of B2B sales. Stay with me for a moment while I explain why and what you should be doing about it. Why is it that some[...]

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Sales Coaching Sales Enablement Insights Sales Training

The Best Sales Training is SMART

Acronyms are useful devices for visualizing and remembering information.  And I’ve made a career out of helping clients turn complex data sets into easily retrievable nuggets.  And frankly, at times that’s involved some Procrustean hacking as I attempted to make the data fit the acronym. In this case, it’s the[...]

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Sales Coaching Sales Enablement Insights Sales Management Sales Tools

How to Develop Sales Talent In the Age of AI

We talk with heads of sales and sales enablement leaders daily, and they are universally concerned about what it will take to develop sales talent in the age of AI for sales and the hyper-empowered buyer. Some of the questions that sales leaders are asking right now include: How much[...]

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