The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

In 1996 Motorola introduced a cellular phone you could wear, email surpassed snail mail for the first time, and a computer named “Deep Blue” defeated the world chess champion. In the midst of this technological change, Al Ries published a marketing book entitled Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends On It.

Reis was already considered a marketing thought-leader, having coined the word “positioning” along with Jack Trout. Positioning was used to describe the perception of your brand relative to that of your competitors. 

Whether you’re positioning your company, your department, or just yourself, the wisdom of focus is important to revisit. 

We have all fallen victim to the impulse buy. That gadget in the checkout line or “gotta have” in the window. Thankfully, most of those spontaneous decisions didn’t have a pronounced impact on our long-term success or happiness.

I’m sure you would agree that hiring a new manager doesn't fall into the same spontaneous purchase category as buying a Wonder Wallet or a Snuggie, but I have seen even the best managers out there succumb to the quick and easy option that is right at their fingertips. When a key management position comes open, the stopwatch starts. It takes massive willpower to not make a quick move, but instead apply the critical thought that is necessary to make a good decision.

We've come to another Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 4 Digital Marketing Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore — Inc.

The four trends described in this article offer an incredible, never-before-realized opportunity to cultivate relationships with your prospects in unique ways. They're also an opportunity for media to forge new offerings to their clients and innovate their way into these new spaces where their competitors aren't.

You can make the best and the most spectacular recommendations to your prospects, but what use is it if the prospect doesn’t share your point of view?

In B2B sales, you’ve probably spent a lot of resources to score an appointment. You’ve generated leads, qualified them, answered initial questions. And you don’t want to lose your ideal prospects now. Consumer psychology can help you reel the prospect in to sign on that dotted line.

Is it even possible to organize time? Let’s look at six ways we can focus our time on the things that are most important to us. 

1. Consider Current Commitments

Take a look at what you have already committed to doing. Look at each appointment on your calendar and each item on your latest to-do list. What result do you want to see from each commitment? How does each one make you feel when you think about that use of your time? 

• No football coach helped his team win the championship by spending time with them in the locker room.

• No driver’s ed instructor added another safe driver to the roads by showing demo videos in the classroom.

• No sales manager helped her salesperson become an industry star by meeting with her weekly in the office. 

If you want to make a significant impact on performance, you need to be in the field where your people are engaging with prospects and clients and where the business happens. This means getting out in the field with your people on calls, joining them on shared-screen client calls (using GoToMeeting, joinme.com, etc.), and looking for other opportunities to be close to the action.

We've come to another Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. How to Beat the Battle of an Ineffective Blog — Content Marketing Institute

A business blog is a powerful tool. But an effective blog requires a strategy. If you're not seeing the kinds of results you want from your blog, take a look at this post, which offers three ways to get your blog performing. 

We all want to listen better. So why do we find it so hard to do? We are often either thinking too much about what we want to say next or talking too much. 

Let’s look at 6 things we need to remind ourselves to do in order to be a better listener.

The topic of sales productivity was introduced to me early on in my career when I was a Senior Financial Analyst at EDS (now HP). I can remember putting together the quarterly Strategic Business Unit (SBU) scorecards and having to come up with the sales headcounts and revenue per salesperson. I was always impressed by one business unit in particular that was able to keep their sales headcount down while maintaining a higher profit margin than any other division. The division was headed by one of the younger SBU leaders, and one late evening after reviewing his numbers I asked him how it was he could keep headcount down and sales up. His answer was very revealing.

For years we heard that the Millennials joining the workforce were chasing adventure. They wanted to work for cool start-ups, collaborate with other Millennials, and change the world!

Surprisingly, a new Inforsys and Future Foundation study of 16-25 year olds shows that this may not be the whole story. It appears that a large portion of this group of fresh faces is craving security and stability rather than spontaneous adventure in their jobs.

Knowing this, you might wonder, "If they want stability in their work, why do we have a retention problem with Millennials in our workforce? Why aren’t these younger workers settling in for the long-haul?" Good questions! A 2015 Gallup Poll found that Millennials are the least-engaged cohort in the workplace, with only 28.9% saying that they are engaged at work.

We've come to another Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. The Ultimate Guide to Sales Qualification — HubSpot

This guide will walk you through the fundamentals of qualification, five different frameworks you can use, and provide pointers on disqualification and conversational tip-offs to listen for during your sales conversations.

For most sales organizations, your sales team most likely represents a wide range of personalities, experience levels as well as performance levels. Organizations typically have top performers or “all stars” as well as those that struggle each month to meet their sales quota or budget for the month. If your organization has determined there are some areas where your sales team can perform better and resources of time and money are available, where do you invest these limited resources? Do you focus on coaching up your bottom performers, do you bring in new talent, or do you focus on maximizing the performance of your top performers?

Here we are at the end of another week, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Are You a Data-Driven Leader? — Optimizely

What do you base your decisions on, as a leader? Opinions or facts? This post provides a quiz to help you determine if you need to use more data in your decision-making process.

We’ve seen many pictures posted that show that some people actually resemble their pets. That prompted a thought that I have noticed many salespeople with traits of either dogs or cats. And everyone knows how different dogs and cats are!

Cataloging repeatable behaviors that are part of the DNA of our pets can reveal how we view each other. Noticing behaviors that fire instinctively in humans and animals are guidelines to better understand their nature and each other. Here’s what I found that made interesting intersections between people and dogs and cats:

Which is more likely to drive strong sales performance: a focus on the numbers or great attention to the sales process?

I recently heard two people talking about the key to sales performance. One person started by saying that the key is to focus on sales process. Then a few minutes later, the other person described hearing a CEO of a very successful company saying he has learned that the key to driving top sales performance is to focus on the numbers. 

At first, this sounded like a conflict to me. But the more I listened, it turns out they were saying the same thing. It’s not either/or. The lesson is to focus on the numbers that are tied to the sales process.