Sales Force Follies: The Tribal Wisdom of Many Sales Forces

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. In many sales organizations, the heavy investment in existing sales practices makes dismounting unfeasible, and these creative strategies are adopted instead:

Increase Your Pipeline: Deploying the Cost Effective Sales Team

As we all know from the go-go days, deploying a new sales team takes significant investment, especially if the sale cycle is lengthy. When venture investment was pouring in, I saw scores of companies spend months building and investing in a sales infrastructure before a single call was made! Their new sales VP would first start his search for regional managers who would subsequently recruit field reps. And then, after the grand sales kick off, it was 6-9 months before the first sale! This just isn’t practical for most companies, regardless of the economic environment.

Leverage Sales Management with Emotional Intelligence - What is Your Lasting Imprint

It all starts with your thinking or your mindset. The best in sales and sales management are positive thinkers.

Leveraging a Sales Person's Motivation

Sales Managers need to evaluate each sales person’s motivation, skills, and the thinking supporting them due to shifting corporate goals and competitive threats.

Hire The Best, Weed Out The Rest: Recruiting Top Sales Producers

Hiring top sales people is the key to accelerating your company’s sales. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Yet even if you agree with this, we all know from experience that finding and attracting high performance sales talent is anything but easy. Getting this right is a combination of both art and science, and requires a real commitment to excellence.

Sales Process - What Can You Automate

In the current complex and competitive market, managing the sales process is an important factor for most businesses. By automating a company’s sales process and efforts, one can increase its productivity.

Clothes May Make The Man, But Debt Makes The Salesman!

According to popular keynote speaker, best-selling author, sales coach, and President of Customersatisfaction.com, Dr. Gary S. Goodman, we can learn a lot from our sales managers and the business owners for whom we work. He shares an insight that reveals the secret of making an average salesperson good, and a good one, great.

Avoiding Merchant Account Disasters

Merchant accounts are an integral part of the puzzle when it comes to accepting credit card payments through your web site. But too many people set up their accounts without fully understanding how merchant accounts function. The result can be frustration and significant financial loss. Learn how to spot potential problems before they start.

The Paradox of International Trade Shows

There is a paradox to exhibiting in an international trade show. And it has two parts. THE FIRST? It is unique because it is foreign. If it’s your first show, it should be a real adventure. If it’s your umpteenth overseas trip, you may view it as a drag, or look at it as an opportunity to maintain and expand relationships. THE SECOND? It is the same as doing a show in the US.

Don't Waffle On Terminating Non-Performing Salespeople

When you can see that a sales person's not performing and that you can see that they're not making steady progress in improving their sales activity and pipeline and actually closing business. The best rule of thumb is to act quickly, to let that kind of person go so that you can make room for replacing them with somebody who can be more productive.

Superior Sales Management Coaching The Successful Blending of Process and Content

In the early years of my sales career it was a mandate from upper management to managers throughout their respective organizations to learn coaching skills and employ them regularly. It was a requirement that they share the wealth of experience and knowledge gained with those throughout their respective teams. As a by-product incredible loyalty to sales managers became a hallmark of sales teams where the managers themselves took an active and participative role in sales team skill set development.

Shifting the Sales Compensation Paradigm

How do you protect cash positions while balancing the seemingly contradictory problem of keeping cost of sales under control and your sales force intact while revenues decrease. Compensating sales efforts appropriately is one solution for protecting margins, profit and cash. Solving this issue may take creating a new paradigm for sales representative compensation.

How to Get the Most Out of Best Sellers

Each product category in your store has a best seller. This product will not necessarily be the cheapest or lowest gross profit item, but it will be the favourite product purchased by your customers in that category. You can use this to your advantage if you introduce some simple management strategies...