Hire the right people. Train them. Monitor their pipelines. Track their close rates. Repeat. The recipe to create a successful sales team seems so basic, but those who are responsible for consistently delivering revenue to their organization know that it can be anything but. A multitude of factors impact the performance of your sales team, [...]

In every activity that is measured (selling, sports, elections, etc.) there is a core set of fundamentals that all participants understand inherently but only the best practice religiously.  And of that core set of fundamentals, there is usually one basic activity that governs performance for the entire group of fundamentals.  The greatest performers in any [...]

We’ve all struggled with the question of what to do with underperforming sales contributors.  There’s the old school method – march them to the firing line.  There’s the HR method – provide a performance review and a “get well or get out plan”.  And occasionally, we see the potential in someone and set a course [...]

A number of pundits have foretold the death of cold calling in the sales process for many years.  Certainly the old days of “smiling and dialing” are no longer effective.  Attempts to replace this practice with auto-dialers and technology platforms that “slam” calls are losing luster in the B2C market, and have questionable effectiveness for [...]

It’s an age old argument, is marketing generating enough leads or qualifying them properly, and is sales in turn capably handling the leads they are given?  Sales will claim that marketing is selling wine before its time, while marketing contends that sales doesn’t know good wine when they taste it.  Depending on your organization, this [...]

Many times sales management does a stack ranking of their sales teams.  I myself have been involved in these quarterly exercises.  It’s always interesting because most of the time it’s the top performers who are stacked on top.  What gets interesting is the line-up below them.  Is the new rep who shows lots of promise [...]

Many times sales management does a stack ranking of their sales teams.  I myself have been involved in these quarterly exercises.  It’s always interesting because most of the time it’s the top performers who are stacked on top.  What gets interesting is the line-up below them.  Is the new rep who shows lots of promise [...]