The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

This was another great week in terms of content. We found a lot to love.

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. The Buzzkill Boss {strategy+business}

The ever-evolving world of digital media can be challenging to stay up-to-date with all of the changes, but if you are selling digital media and want to do it effectively, it is a challenge you must take! 

So where you do you start? There is so much information available and it can feel overwhelming. I would recommend that you find a handful of different resources that you turn to on a regular basis. I like to think about resources in categories – those that help keep me up to date on what is coming and what is changing in digital media, tools to gain insight about a company’s website and those that help me stay current on consumer trends.

Below are 12 of my favorite digital resources:

Websites:

I’m reading a book called “The Leadership Wisdom of Solomon,” by Pat Williams, Senior VP of the NBA Orlando Magic.

There's so much content on the internet that we can't even begin to consume it all. That's why we started curating some of the best pieces of writing we find each week.

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. Lessons in Leadership: How George Washington Abandoned His Ambitions and Won Big {Inc.}

Maybe you’ve heard the saying that no one washes a rental car. Think about it. Does anyone try to budget time on the way back to the airport to run through the car wash? Of course not. Even if they’re OCD and are obsessive about cleanliness, they still don’t wash that rental. They know someone at the rental car company will do it, and the thought won't even cross their mind.

“Those who fail to plan are guilty of planning to fail.”

A few years ago, Google began setting a stage for users to be able to receive relevant search results based on content from social networks such as Twitter, Blogger, and Google Reader, along with other social networks that no longer exist. Google named this new content delivery Social Search and aimed to engage users by offering content from friends they knew and people they followed.

What an excellent week! 

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. Get More Done by Focusing Less on Work {From Harvard Business Review}

Recently we did an informal survey with some client sales managers asking them to tell us about those things from last year for which they wished they could have a “do over.”

Not surprisingly, the responses included a very broad variety of things they’d dearly love to do over. But 100% of the responses had a single characteristic in common—these sales managers told us they waited too long to make a tough decision. By the time they did, it seemed really obvious, not only to them but also to a lot of others in the organization who had been scratching their heads over the non-action for quite a while.

Managers are Optimistic But are Often Without a Process of Evaluation

That got me thinking about what causes this procrastination and how to prevent it. Part of it is the built-in optimism and the warm interpersonal relationships that we know characterize the best sales managers. But most of the blame goes to not having a clear process of evaluation. A clear process means the manager has:

• Established the criteria by which success will be measured
• Determined the intervals at which those criteria will be noted and evaluated

A few nights before the Super Bowl, we were all gathered around the dinner table, discussing the upcoming “big game.” My daughter suggested that the Super Bowl should be a national holiday. I asked why and she said, “It happens every year no matter what, everyone pays attention, even if they don’t like football, because they want to see the commercials, and we watch the whole game just for the commercials. So we should get the day off of school, making it a holiday!”

Improving Sales Performance Often Requires Changing Focus

Have you ever had a ticket to this movie as a B2B sales consultant?

You’ve been working with a sales organization for a year or so and installed the following systems:

• Account list management
• Talent recruitment and development
• Sales training and related revenue development initiatives

And nothing is happening… sales performance remains the same!

As B2B sales training consultants we often overlook the concept of focus and control when helping struggling sales organizations.  Simply put, two things exist in the world of salespeople: Things they control and things they do not control.

Here’s a list of things salespeople do not control:

• Pricing
• Inventory
• The economy
• RFPs
• The competition
• The attitudes of their customers
• Other departments in their company
• Account assignments
• Sales quotas

This week was excellent in terms of content found online.

Here's what piqued our interest this week:

1. How to Stop Procrastinating {From Barking up the Wrong Tree}

More than anything else, I write about industry, economic, and consumer trends at The Marketing Mind Blog. But there is one trend that deserves some attention here on this sales-oriented blog: 2014 has been the best year for job growth since 1999. That’s according to a story from CNN Money, but it’s not hard to find other evidence of solid employment growth.